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Agent guide: [/agents.md](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/agents.md). --- # Staff Software Engineer I - Confluent Infrastructure - **Company:** IBM - **Location:** United States - **Experience:** Expert - **Contract:** Permanent contract - **Skills:** Abstraction Layers, Amazon Web Services, Computing Platforms, Microsoft Azure, C++ (Programming Language), Cloud Computing, Cloud Engineering, Code Review, Computer Networks, Disaster Recovery, Protocol Buffers, Hypervisor, Identity and Access Management, Linux Kernel, Open Source Technology, Pair Programming, Performance Tuning, Google Cloud, Software Troubleshooting, Core Api, Kubernetes, Information Technology, Api Design, Serverless Computing - **Published:** August 16, 2026 - **Apply:** https://www.dice.com/job-detail/204b7228-69ce-4f10-bea5-390767597c27 ## About the Role Bachelor's Degree Preferred education Master's Degree Required technical and professional expertise * 10+ years of relevant experience delivering scalable backend or infrastructure software in production. Education in computer science or a related field, or equivalent work experience. * Experience 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 environment. * Deep expertise in Kubernetes, including controller development, operator patterns, and preferably multi-region or multi-cluster architectures. * Strong proficiency in Go, Scala, C++, or other statically typed languages, building production-grade services and control planes. * Experience 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 workloads. * Familiarity with gRPC, Protobuf, and internal platform API design for service-to-service communication. * Experience with public cloud environments (such as AWS, Google Cloud Platform, Azure) and cloud-provider integrations. * Strong 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 execution. Preferred technical and professional experience * Experience in one or more of the following domains: storage, compute orchestration, networking, security, or performance engineering. * Familiarity with Kubernetes, service meshes, and cloud-native architectures. * Contributions to open-source infrastructure projects., Being an IBMer means you'll be able to learn and develop yourself and your career, you'll be encouraged to be courageous and experiment everyday, all whilst having continuous trust and support in an environment where everyone can thrive whatever their personal or professional background. Our IBMers are growth minded, always staying curious, open to feedback and learning new information and skills to constantly transform themselves and our company. They are trusted to provide on-going feedback to help other IBMers grow, as well as collaborate with colleagues keeping in mind a team focused approach to include different perspectives to drive exceptional outcomes for our customers. The courage our IBMers have to make critical decisions everyday is essential to IBM becoming the catalyst for progress, always embracing challenges with resources they have to hand, a can-do attitude and always striving for an outcome focused approach within everything that they do. Are you ready to be an IBMer?, IBM will not be providing visa sponsorship for this position now or in the future. Therefore, in order to be considered for this position, you must have the ability to work without a need for current or future visa sponsorship. ## Description As a Staff Software Engineer on the Secure Compute Platform team, you will be a key technical leader in building and evolving a next-generation, multi-tenant, cloud-native compute platform that safety runs both trusted and untrusted workloads at scale. Our platform is built on Kubernetes and runs across a large fleet of clusters in multiple public clouds, providing a unified abstraction layer for workload execution, lifecycle management, security, and operational excellence. What You Will Do: * Define and drive the technical direction for Secure Compute, including platform architecture, runtime, and security for running trusted and untrusted workloads ate 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 bulid on a common compute substrate. * 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, 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, operable platform development. * Own operational excellence for key Secure Compute services, including availability, reliability, SLOs, performance, on-call response, incident management, and disaster recovery. ## Related Videos - [Insights from building the Canva Developers Platform to empower 185 million designers](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/videos/942-insights-from-building-the-canva-developers-platform-to-empower-185-million-designers) - [API Design - Getting Started](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/videos/33-api-design-getting-started) - [Understanding Kubernetes in a visual way](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/videos/100085-understanding-kubernetes-in-a-visual-way) - [Building with IBM Bob](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/videos/100275-building-with-ibm-bob) - [Rest API Antipatterns](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/videos/100208-rest-api-antipatterns) - [Why make use of an integration platform in today's software developments and infrastructure?](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/videos/758-why-make-use-of-an-integration-platform-in-today-s-software-developments-and-infrastructure) ## Related Articles - [Is Software Engineering Over-Saturated?](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/magazine/418-is-software-engineering-over-saturated) - [Top-Paying Tech Jobs (with Salaries)](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/magazine/372-top-paying-tech-jobs-with-salaries) - [System change: restart as developer?](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/magazine/39-system-change-restart-as-developer) - [The 12 Best Jobs for Software Engineers](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/magazine/401-the-12-best-jobs-for-software-engineers) - [7 Important Tips That Every Software Developer Should Know](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/magazine/101-7-important-tips-that-every-software-developer-should-know) - [Where to Find Entry-Level Software Engineering Jobs](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/magazine/397-where-to-find-entry-level-software-engineering-jobs)