Staff Software Engineer, Secure Compute Platform (Kubernetes/Go)

IBM; Tucson (AZ); On-site; USD 150,000 - 190,000; Full time

Job summary

IBM is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to lead the Secure Compute Platform initiative, shaping multi-tenant, cloud-native infrastructure built on Kubernetes across public clouds. You will design APIs, drive security, and oversee the runtime to support trusted and untrusted workloads at scale.

You will mentor engineers, collaborate with product and platform teams, and own operational excellence for critical services.

Qualifications

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

Responsibilities

• Define technical direction for Secure Compute platform, including architecture, runtime, and security for running trusted and untrusted workloads at scale.
• Design and implement platform APIs and Kubernetes controllers/operators.
• Partner with product and platform teams to shape the roadmap for Secure Compute, enabling new customer-facing features and internal platforms.
• Deliver initiatives in workload scheduling, rollout strategies, and fleet-level resource management.
• Lead technical design reviews and influence architecture across teams; ensure Safe by default principles.
• Mentor engineers and share best practices for secure, reliable platform development.
• Own operational excellence for key Secure Compute services, including availability, reliability, SLOs, incident management, and disaster recovery.
• This job can be performed from anywhere in the US.

Skills

Kubernetes

Go

Multi-tenant security

Isolation primitives

Container runtimes

Linux internals

gRPC

Protobuf

API design

Observability

Cloud integrations

Technical leadership

Education

Master's Degree

Job description

IBM is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to lead the Secure Compute Platform initiative, shaping multi-tenant, cloud-native infrastructure built on Kubernetes across public clouds. You will design APIs, drive security, and oversee the runtime to support trusted and untrusted workloads at scale.

You will mentor engineers, collaborate with product and platform teams, and own operational excellence for critical services.