Staff Software Engineer I - Confluent Cloud 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.

Your role and responsibilities

We are looking for a staff level technical leader to help us build the next‑generation network data plane to enable our Confluent Cloud platform to achieve 10x the current scale. This is a hybrid engineering role, blending deep software development expertise with hands‑on operational excellence.

Cloud networking is a strategic investment area with significant potential to impact the company's growth. The Traffic team is responsible for the network platform of Confluent Cloud with a focus on performance, security, reliability, and cost optimizations for all network traffic that ingresses and egresses a customer's Kafka and DSP deployments as well as all internal service to service traffic on Confluent Cloud.

You will architect, design and lead cross‑team initiatives to deliver highly scalable, cost efficient, networking data plane solutions, while also ensuring these systems are reliable, observable, and resilient in production. You’ll work across engineering, security, product, and platform orgs to deliver building blocks that empower product teams to integrate networking seamlessly.

What You Will Do:

• Design, develop, and operationalize high-performance, scalable, reliable, and resilient systems for the Confluent Cloud network data plane platform.
• Independently drive the execution of ambiguously scoped cross-team software projects, ensuring the delivery of complex projects in production with a focus on quality.
• Leverage cloud providers to deliver impactful business solutions.
• Troubleshoot and improve operations for a complex technical stack that spans across AWS, Azure, and GCP, including microservices, containers, and virtualization.

Required education

None

Preferred education

None

Required technical and professional expertise

• BS, MS, or PhD in Computer Science or a related field, or equivalent work experience.
• Extensive experience of the software engineering industry experience.
• Strong fundamentals in distributed systems design and development.
• Experience in building and operating large-scale systems.
• Solid understanding of networking primitives and protocols.
• Self‑starter with the ability to work effectively in teams.
• Proficiency in C++, Go, Python, or other programming languages

Preferred technical and professional experience

• Experience with Kubernetes.
• Experience with network proxies and/or load balancers.
• Experience with public clouds (AWS, Azure, or GCP).

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.

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