Staff Software Engineer, Secure Compute Platform (Kubernetes)

IBM Computing; Armonk (NY); Remote; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

IBM Software is seeking a Staff Software Engineer for the Secure Compute Platform to advance a multi-tenant, cloud-native compute substrate that safely runs both trusted and untrusted workloads at scale.

You will work on critical systems built on Kubernetes across public clouds, define APIs, drive platform integration, and mentor engineers to ensure security, reliability, and cost efficiency of mission-critical workloads.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of experience delivering scalable backend or infrastructure software in production.
• Proven track record leading large-scale distributed systems.
• Deep expertise in Kubernetes, including controllers/operators.
• Strong proficiency in Go with production-grade services.
• Experience with multi-tenant platform architectures and security/isolation patterns.
• Familiarity with gRPC, Protobuf, and internal API design.
• Hands-on observability and operational practices (metrics, logs, traces).
• Experience with AWS, GCP, Azure.
• Demonstrated technical leadership and mentorship.

Responsibilities

• Define 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 handling, private/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 platform development.
• Own operational excellence for key Secure Compute services, including availability, reliability, SLOs, performance, on-call response, incident management, and disaster recovery.

Skills

Kubernetes

Go

Distributed systems

Backend development

Security/isolation patterns

Leadership

Observability

Public cloud platforms

Education

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science

Master's degree preferred

Tools

gRPC

Protobuf

Linux

Kata Containers

Cloud Hypervisor

Job description

IBM Software is seeking a Staff Software Engineer for the Secure Compute Platform to advance a multi-tenant, cloud-native compute substrate that safely runs both trusted and untrusted workloads at scale.

You will work on critical systems built on Kubernetes across public clouds, define APIs, drive platform integration, and mentor engineers to ensure security, reliability, and cost efficiency of mission-critical workloads.