[Remote] Staff Software Engineer I - Confluent Infrastructure

Note: The job is a remote job and is open to candidates in USA. IBM Software transforms client challenges into innovative solutions, focusing on AI-powered, cloud-native products. The Staff Software Engineer will lead the development of a multi-tenant, cloud-native compute platform, ensuring secure execution of workloads and collaborating with various teams to enhance product offerings.ResponsibilitiesDefine and drive the technical direction for Secure Compute, including platform architecture, runtime, and security for running trusted and untrusted workloads at scaleDesign and implement platform APIs and Kubernetes controllers/operators (primarily in Go) that power workload lifecycle, autoscaling, placement, and isolation for containers and serverless-style functionsPartner 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 substrateDeliver high-impact initiatives in areas such as workload scheduling, failure and disruption handling, private and public networking patterns, rollout strategies, and fleet-level resource managementLead technical design reviews and influence architecture across teams, ensuring Secure Compute primitives are easy to adopt, safe by default, and aligned with broader platform strategyMentor and grow engineers on the team through design guidance, code reviews, pair programming, and sharing best practices for secure, reliable, operable platform developmentOwn operational excellence for key Secure Compute services, including availability, reliability, SLOs, performance, on-call response, incident management, and disaster recoverySkills10+ years of relevant experience delivering scalable backend or infrastructure software in production. Education in computer science or a related field, or equivalent work experienceExperience in building and operating large-scale, high-availability systems. A self-starter with strong problem-solving skills and the ability to work in a fast-paced environmentDeep expertise in Kubernetes, including controller development, operator patterns, and preferably multi-region or multi-cluster architecturesStrong proficiency in Go, Scala, C++, or other statically typed languages, building production-grade services and control planesExperience with multi-tenant platform architectures and security/isolation patterns (for example, namespaces, network policies, sandboxing, secrets and identity management), plus hands-on work with secure container runtimes and low-level Linux internals (for example, Kata Containers, Cloud Hypervisor, cgroups, namespaces, seccomp) and performance troubleshooting and tuning for containerized/virtualized workloadsFamiliarity with gRPC, Protobuf, and internal platform API design for service-to-service communicationExperience with public cloud environments (such as AWS, GCP, Azure) and cloud-provider integrationsStrong collaboration skills and 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 executionMaster's DegreeExperience in one or more of the following domains: storage, compute orchestration, networking, security, or performance engineeringFamiliarity with Kubernetes, service meshes, and cloud-native architecturesContributions to open-source infrastructure projectsCompany OverviewIBM provides technology and consulting, including software, infrastructure systems, and cloud-based solutions. It was founded in 1911, and is headquartered in Armonk, New York, USA, with a workforce of 10001+ employees. Its website is http://www.ibm.com.Company H1B SponsorshipIBM has a track record of offering H1B sponsorships, with 279 in 2026, 2993 in 2025, 3258 in 2024, 2139 in 2023, 1807 in 2022, 1156 in 2021, 2669 in 2020. Please note that this does not guarantee sponsorship for this specific role.