Staff Software Engineer I - Confluent Compute Platform

Introduction At IBM Software, we transform client challenges into solutions. Building the world’s leading AI-powered, cloud-native products that shape the future of business and society. Our legacy of innovation creates endless opportunities for IBMers to learn, grow, and make an impact on a global scale. Working in Software means joining a team fueled by curiosity and collaboration. You’ll work with diverse technologies, partners, and industries to design, develop, and deliver solutions that power digital transformation. With a culture that values innovation, growth, and continuous learning, IBM Software places you at the heart of IBM’s product and technology landscape. Here, you’ll have the tools and opportunities to advance your career while creating software that changes the world. With Confluent, data doesn’t sit still. We put information in motion, streaming in near real time so organizations can react faster, build smarter, and deliver experiences as dynamic as the world around them. Your Role And Responsibilities About the Role: As a Software Engineer On The Compute Platform Team, You Will Be a Key Technical Leader In Building And Evolving Our Next-generation, Multi-tenant, Cloud-native Compute Substrate That Powers All Of Confluent Cloud's Diverse Workloads. Our Platform Orchestrates Workloads Across Thousands Of Kubernetes Clusters Globally Across All Cloud Service Providers, Providing a Unified Abstraction Layer For Scheduling, Lifecycle Management, And Operational Excellence. You'll Work On Critical Systems Including Multi-Cluster Workload Orchestration: Build the control plane that manages workload placement, lifecycle, and state across multiple Kubernetes clusters per region Platform APIs & Abstractions: Design and evolve APIs that provide clean abstractions for polyglot workload management across diverse compute needs Cloud Platform Integration: Build and optimize deep integrations with the broader Confluent Cloud platform for seamless end-to-end operations Multi-Tenancy & Security: Implement and enhance workload isolation, network policies, and secure execution environments Observability & Operations: Drive operational excellence through monitoring integration, automated health checks, and self-healing capabilities As a senior technical leader, you think strategically and help drive end-to-end technical delivery from customer experience to scaling internal operations. You leverage your expertise in cloud-native distributed systems to take our platform to the next level while ensuring high availability, reliability, and security for our largest enterprise customers. What You Will Do Drive the overall technical charter for the Compute Platform, including multi-cluster orchestration, workload placement, and security architecture Design and implement platform APIs and Kubernetes operators using Go to support evolving workload requirements Work closely with product management and engineering leadership to build and drive the roadmap for Confluent's Compute Platform, enabling new business opportunities across Confluent. Deliver high-impact initiatives in areas such as workload scheduling, disruption management, network isolation, rolling update strategies, and cross-cluster resource management. Lead technical design reviews and drive architectural decisions across organizational boundaries Mentor and grow other engineers on the team through code reviews, pairing, and technical guidance Own operational aspects including availability, reliability, performance monitoring, emergency response, and disaster recovery for our global compute infrastructure This job can be performed from anywhere in the US Preferred Education Master's Degree Required Technical And Professional Expertise 8+ years of experience delivering scalable software solutions Proven track record of leading the delivery of large-scale, highly available, low-latency systems Deep expertise in Kubernetes including controller development, operator patterns, and multi-cluster architectures Strong proficiency in Go with experience building production-grade distributed systems Experience with multi-tenant platform architectures and security isolation patterns Preferred Technical And Professional Experience Familiarity with gRPC, Protobuf, and API design for internal platform services Experience with observability tools and operational excellence practices Experience with multi-cloud environments (AWS, GCP, Azure) and cloud-provider integrations Track record of providing technical leadership and mentorship Track record of working collaboratively across teams including product management, SRE, and other engineering teams A smart, humble, and empathetic attitude with a strong sense of teamwork Drive and excitement about the challenges of a fast-paced, innovative software environment