Principal Engineer, Cloud Networking & Distributed Systems

IBM Computing

Tucson (AZ)

Remote

USD 140,000 - 210,000

Full time

14 days+

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Job summary

IBM Software is transforming client challenges into scalable AI-powered, cloud-native solutions. We seek a Principal Engineer to join the Traffic team, building the Confluent Cloud network data plane across AWS, Azure, and GCP.

You will shape architecture, drive multi-cloud initiatives, and lead a team to deliver high-performance, reliable systems. The role emphasizes large-scale distributed systems, cost-optimized networking, and collaboration with product and cloud providers, with remote work

Qualifications

12+ years of cloud infrastructure/cloud networking experience.
Strong fundamentals in distributed systems design and development.
Experience driving vision and technical roadmap as an architect in a large platforms or infrastructure team.
Experience building and operating large-scale systems.
Experience leading a team of engineers and cross-team collaboration.
Solid understanding of basic systems operations (storage, network, OS).
Proficiency in C++, Go, Python, or other statically typed languages.
Experience with public clouds (AWS, Azure, or GCP).
Experience building and managing Layer 7 proxies, especially cloud-native proxies like Envoy.

Responsibilities

Build and operate the network data plane platform powering Confluent Cloud.
Drive architectural initiatives across networking, cloud infra, and multi-tenancy.
Independently lead architecture, roadmap, and execution of projects with production impact.
Engage with product teams and cloud providers to solve problems with technical input.
Contribute to open source and upstream communities for business impact.
Troubleshoot and improve ops for a large-scale stack across clouds, microservices, and virtualization.