Note: The job is a remote job and is open to candidates in USA. IBM Software develops AI-powered, cloud-native products, including Confluent Cloud, a real-time data streaming platform. The Staff Software Engineer will provide technical leadership for the Secure Compute Platform, building multi-tenant, Kubernetes-based infrastructure that safely runs trusted and untrusted workloads across public clouds. The role includes designing platform APIs and controllers, improving security and observability, partnering across teams, mentoring engineers, and owning operational excellence.
Responsibilities
- Secure Compute Infrastructure - Build and evolve the secure, multi-tenant compute substrate and isolation primitives that safely execute customer and internal workloads in a shared environment
- Platform APIs & Abstractions - Design and evolve APIs that provide clear, safe abstractions for polyglot workloads (containers, functions, and services) with diverse performance and isolation needs
- Core Platform Integration - Integrate the Secure Compute platform with core data and application services so that teams can onboard new workloads with minimal friction
- Multi-Tenancy & Security - Implement and harden workload isolation, network policies, identity and access, and secure execution environments required to safely run customer-supplied code
- Observability & Operations - Drive operational excellence through rich observability, automated health checks, self-healing workflows, and robust rollout and rollback practices
- Define and drive the 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 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
Skills
- Master's Degree
- 10+ years of experience delivering scalable backend or infrastructure software in production
- Proven track record of leading the delivery of large-scale, highly available, low-latency distributed systems
- Deep expertise in Kubernetes, including controller development, operator patterns, and preferably multi-region or multi-cluster architectures
- Strong proficiency in Go with experience building production-grade services and control planes
- Experience with multi-tenant platform architectures and security/isolation patterns (for example, namespaces, network policies, sandboxing, secrets management and identity management)
- Hands-on experience with secure container runtimes and low-level Linux internals (for example, Kata containers, Cloud Hypervisor, cgroups, namespaces and seccomp)
- Experience troubleshooting and optimizing performance for containerized and virtualized workloads
- Familiarity with gRPC, Protobuf, and internal platform API design for service-to-service communication
- Hands-on experience with observability and operational best practices (metrics, logging, distributed tracing, alerting, Service Level Objectives/SLOs, rollout strategies, incident response)
- Experience with public cloud environments, including AWS, GCP, and Azure, as well as cloud-provider integrations
- Demonstrated technical leadership and mentorship, including driving cross-team alignment on architecture, strategic direction, and execution
- Strong collaboration skills and a demonstrated ability to work effectively with Product, SRE/Operations, Security, and Engineering teams
- A smart, humble, and empathetic approach, coupled with a strong sense of ownership, accountability, and teamwork
- Passion for building foundational cloud infrastructure and enthusiasm for working in a fast-paced, innovative environment
Benefits
- This job can be performed from anywhere in the United States.
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