Description

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
  
  

Required education

Bachelor's Degree

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
  

ABOUT BUSINESS UNIT

IBM Software infuses core business operations with intelligence—from machine learning to generative AI—to help make organizations more responsive, productive, and resilient. IBM Software helps clients put AI into action now to create real value with trust, speed, and confidence across digital labor, IT automation, application modernization, security, and sustainability. Critical to this is the ability to make use of all data, because AI is only as good as the data that fuels it. In most organizations data is spread across multiple clouds, on premises, in private datacenters, and at the edge. IBM's AI and data platform scales and accelerates the impact of AI with trusted data, and provides leading capabilities to train, tune and deploy AI across business. IBM's hybrid cloud platform is one of the most comprehensive and consistent approach to development, security, and operations across hybrid environments—a flexible foundation for leveraging data, wherever it resides, to extend AI deep into a business.

YOUR LIFE @ IBM

In a world where technology never stands still, we understand that, dedication to our clients success, innovation that matters, and trust and personal responsibility in all our relationships, lives in what we do as IBMers as we strive to be the catalyst that makes the world work better.

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?

ABOUT IBM

IBM's greatest invention is the IBMer. We believe that through the application of intelligence, reason and science, we can improve business, society and the human condition, bringing the power of an open hybrid cloud and AI strategy to life for our clients and partners around the world.

Restlessly reinventing since 1911, we are not only one of the largest corporate organizations in the world, we're also one of the biggest technology and consulting employers, with many of the Fortune 500 companies relying on the IBM Cloud to run their business.

At IBM, we pride ourselves on being an early adopter of artificial intelligence, quantum computing and blockchain. Now it's time for you to join us on our journey to being a responsible technology innovator and a force for good in the world.

IBM is proud to be an equal-opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, gender, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, national origin, genetics, pregnancy, disability, neurodivergence, age, or other characteristics protected by the applicable law. IBM is also committed to compliance with all fair employment practices regarding citizenship and immigration status.

OTHER RELEVANT JOB DETAILS

IBM offers a competitive and comprehensive benefits program. Eligible employees may have access to:

- Healthcare benefits including medical & prescription drug coverage, dental, vision, and mental health & well being

- Financial programs such as 401(k), cash balance pension plan, the IBM Employee Stock Purchase Plan, financial counseling, life insurance, short & long- term disability coverage, and opportunities for performance based salary incentive programs

- Generous paid time off including 12 holidays, minimum 56 hours sick time, 120 hours vacation, 12 weeks parental bonding leave in accordance with IBM Policy, and other Paid Care Leave programs. IBM also offers paid family leave benefits to eligible employees where required by applicable law

- Training and educational resources on our personalized, AI-driven learning platform where IBMers can grow skills and obtain industry-recognized certifications to achieve their career goals

- Diverse and inclusive employee resource groups, giving & volunteer opportunities, and discounts on retail products, services & experiences

We consider qualified applicants with criminal histories, consistent with applicable law.

This position was posted on the date cited in the key job details section and is anticipated to remain posted for 21 days from this date or less if not needed to fill the role.

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.

The compensation range and benefits for this position are based on a full-time schedule for a full calendar year. The salary will vary depending on your job-related skills, experience and location. Pay increment and frequency of pay will be in accordance with employment classification and applicable laws. For part time roles, your compensation and benefits will be adjusted to reflect your hours. Benefits may be pro-rated for those who start working during the calendar year.

Job Title

Staff Software Engineer I - Confluent Compute Platform

Date posted

11-May-2026

Job ID

114264

City / Township / Village

POUGHKEEPSIE, LOWELL, ROCHESTER, TUCSON, RESEARCH TRIANGLE PARK, Armonk, DURHAM, Raleigh, Boston, Bellevue, Atlanta, San Jose, Dallas, Austin, San Francisco, Seattle

State / Province

Georgia, Minnesota, Texas, New York, North Carolina, Arizona, Washington, Massachusetts, California

Country

United States

Work arrangement

Hybrid

Area of work

Software Engineering

Employment type

Regular

Contract type

Regular

Projected Minimum Salary per year

161,000.00

Projected Maximum Salary per year

299,000.00

Position type

Professional

Travel required

Some travel may be required based on business demand

Company

(0147) International Business Machines Corporation

Shift

General (daytime)

Is this role a commissionable/sales incentive based position?

No



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