Staff Software Engineer I - Confluent Infrastructure

IBM; Rochester (MN); Remote; USD 120,000 - 150,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Healthcare benefits

401(k) and financial counseling

Generous paid time off

Training and educational resources

Diverse employee resource groups

Job summary

IBM is seeking a Staff Software Engineer I to join their Secure Compute Team in Rochester, Minnesota. The role involves designing and implementing a cloud-native compute platform, requiring extensive experience in Kubernetes and scalable system architecture. You will drive technical direction, mentor engineers, and lead initiatives in workload management.

This position offers comprehensive healthcare benefits, generous paid time off, and opportunities for professional growth. Ideal candidates have 10+ years of relevant experience and strong collaboration skills.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of experience delivering scalable backend or infrastructure software.
• Experience in large-scale systems in production environments.
• Deep expertise in Kubernetes, controller development, and operator patterns.

Responsibilities

• Define the technical direction for Secure Compute, including architecture and security.
• Design and implement platform APIs and Kubernetes controllers/operators.
• Lead technical design reviews and influence broader architectural decisions.

Skills

Kubernetes expertise

Proficiency in Go

Experience in building large-scale systems

Collaboration skills

Knowledge of cloud environments (AWS, GCP, Azure)

Education

Bachelor's Degree

Master's Degree

Tools

Kubernetes

Go

Job description

Job Title

Staff Software Engineer I - Confluent Infrastructure

About the Team

The Secure Compute Team builds and operates the foundational infrastructure layer that powers Confluent Cloud. Our mission is to enable the safe execution of code and data processing in multi‑tenant environments across AWS, Azure, and GCP at scale. We provide the essential building blocks — isolation, identity, and networking — that empower our customers and internal product teams to innovate without compromising security.

About the Role

As a Staff Software Engineer on the Secure Compute Platform team, you will be a key technical leader in building and evolving a next‑generation, multi‑tenant, cloud‑native compute platform that safely runs both trusted and untrusted workloads at scale. Our platform is built on Kubernetes and runs across a large fleet of clusters in multiple public clouds, providing a unified abstraction layer for workload execution, lifecycle management, security, and operational excellence.

What You Will Do

• Define and drive the technical direction for Secure Compute, including platform architecture, runtime, and security for running trusted and untrusted workloads at scale.
• Design and implement platform APIs and Kubernetes controllers/operators (primarily in Go) that power workload lifecycle, autoscaling, placement, and isolation for containers and serverless‑style functions.
• Partner with product and platform teams to shape and deliver the roadmap for Secure Compute, enabling new customer‑facing features and internal platforms to build on a common compute substrate.
• Deliver high‑impact initiatives in areas such as workload scheduling, failure and disruption handling, private and public networking patterns, rollout strategies, and fleet‑level resource management.
• Lead technical design reviews and influence architecture across teams, ensuring Secure Compute primitives are easy to adopt, safe by default, and aligned with broader platform strategy.
• Mentor and grow engineers on the team through design guidance, code reviews, pair programming, and sharing best practices for secure, reliable, operable platform development.
• Own operational excellence for key Secure Compute services, including availability, reliability, SLOs, performance, on‑call response, incident management, and disaster recovery.

This job can be performed from anywhere in the US.

Required Education

Bachelor's Degree

Preferred Education

Master's Degree

Required Technical and Professional Expertise

• 10+ years of relevant experience delivering scalable backend or infrastructure software in production; education in computer science or a related field, or equivalent work experience.
• Experience in building and operating large‑scale, high‑availability systems in a fast‑paced environment.
• Deep expertise in Kubernetes, including controller development, operator patterns, and preferably multi‑region or multi‑cluster architectures.
• Strong proficiency in Go, Scala, C++, or other statically typed languages, building production‑grade services and control planes.
• Experience with multi‑tenant platform architectures and security/isolation patterns (e.g., namespaces, network policies, sandboxing, secrets, identity management), hands‑on work with secure container runtimes and low‑level Linux internals (e.g., Kata Containers, Cloud Hypervisor, cgroups, namespaces, seccomp), and performance troubleshooting and tuning for containerized/virtualized workloads.
• Familiarity with gRPC, Protobuf, and internal platform API design for service‑to‑service communication.
• Experience with public cloud environments (AWS, GCP, Azure) and cloud‑provider integrations.
• Strong collaboration skills and a history of working effectively with product, SRE/operations, security, and peer engineering teams. Demonstrated technical leadership and mentorship, including driving cross‑team alignment on architecture and execution.

Preferred Technical and Professional Experience

• Experience in one or more of the following domains: storage, compute orchestration, networking, security, or performance engineering.
• Familiarity with Kubernetes, service meshes, and cloud‑native architectures.
• Contributions to open‑source infrastructure projects.

Equal‑Opportunity Employment

IBM is proud to be an equal‑opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, gender, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, national origin, genetics, pregnancy, disability, neurodivergence, age, or other characteristics protected by the applicable law. IBM is also committed to compliance with all fair employment practices regarding citizenship and immigration status.

Benefits

• Healthcare benefits, including medical, prescription drug coverage, dental, vision, and mental health well‑being.
• Financial programs such as 401(k), cash balance pension plan, IBM Employee Stock Purchase Plan, financial counseling, life insurance, short & long‑term disability coverage, and opportunities for performance‑based salary incentive programs.
• Generous paid time off: 12 holidays, minimum 56 hours sick time, 120 hours vacation, 12 weeks parental bonding leave in accordance with IBM policy, and other paid care leave programs (and paid family leave benefits where required).
• Training and educational resources via IBM’s personalized, AI‑driven learning platform, enabling industry‑recognized certifications and career growth.
• Diverse and inclusive employee resource groups, giving & volunteer opportunities, and discounts on retail products, services & experiences.