Staff Software Engineer II — Secure Compute Platform

IBM; Lowell (MA); On-site; USD 170,000 - 260,000; Full time

Job summary

IBM Software is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to build a next-generation, multi-tenant, cloud-native compute platform. You will lead the architecture, collaborate across teams, and drive secure execution of workloads at scale across public clouds.

The role emphasizes reliability, security, performance, and cost efficiency in a fast-paced environment. You will mentor engineers, design platform APIs and Kubernetes controllers, and own operational excellence including SLOs, observability, and

Qualifications

• 10+ years of backend/infrastructure software experience.
• Experience delivering large-scale distributed systems.

Responsibilities

• 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
• Partner with product and platform teams to shape and deliver the roadmap for Secure Compute
• 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
• Mentor and grow engineers on the team through design guidance, code reviews, pair programming, and sharing best practices
• Own operational excellence for key Secure Compute services, including availability, reliability, SLOs, performance, on-call response, incident management, and disaster recovery

Skills

Kubernetes

Go programming

Distributed systems

Security/isolation

Cloud platforms

Observability

Leadership

Mentorship

Kubernetes controllers

Education

Master's degree

Tools

Protobuf

gRPC

Kata containers

AWS

GCP

Azure

Job description

IBM Software is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to build a next-generation, multi-tenant, cloud-native compute platform. You will lead the architecture, collaborate across teams, and drive secure execution of workloads at scale across public clouds.

The role emphasizes reliability, security, performance, and cost efficiency in a fast-paced environment. You will mentor engineers, design platform APIs and Kubernetes controllers, and own operational excellence including SLOs, observability, and