Confluent - Staff Software Engineer - Control Plane Core Infrastructure

IBM
IBM

Software Engineering, Other Engineering

Remote

Posted on Oct 6, 2026
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
About the Role

We’re looking for a Staff Software Engineer I to lead the design and delivery of core control-plane infrastructure that powers Confluent Cloud. In this role, you will own highly technical projects across multiple services and teams, shaping the architecture and reliability of our cloud platform. You’ll combine deep distributed systems expertise with strong execution and cross-team leadership, identifying high-leverage problems and driving them from idea to durable impact.

What You Will Do

  • Own end-to-end architecture and delivery of complex control-plane systems (APIs, controllers, orchestration workflows, and data models) that support Confluent Cloud products.

  • Lead open-ended technical initiatives by taking ambiguous problems, clarifying requirements, defining the approach, and driving execution across teams and services.

  • Raise the bar on reliability and operations by building resilient systems with strong observability, clear SLOs, runbooks, and safe rollout and rollback patterns.

  • Collaborate across organizations, including Cloud Platform, Kafka, Compute, Security, Traffic, SRE, and others, to align on designs, trade-offs, and long-term platform direction.

  • Mentor and unblock engineers at multiple levels, provide high-quality design and code reviews, and help grow the broader engineering team.

  • Continuously improve the developer experience for our control-plane stack through tooling, automation, CI/CD, and test strategy enhancements that reduce toil and increase velocity.

  • Influence technical strategy within your domain by identifying high-impact opportunities, proposing roadmaps, and helping prioritize work aligned with business goals.

  • Contribute to engineering culture through documentation, design reviews, and knowledge sharing, including internal talks, wikis, and external content where appropriate.

Required education
Bachelor's Degree
Preferred education
Master's Degree
Required technical and professional expertise

  • Experienced builder: Typically 6+ years of software engineering experience, with a strong track record of delivering complex backend or distributed systems to production.

  • Distributed systems & cloud expert: Deep hands-on experience with one or more of the following:

    • Distributed systems design (consistency models, failure modes, data modeling, and scalability).
    • Cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, or Azure) and cloud-native architectures.
    • Kubernetes or similar orchestration platforms.

  • Strong systems and coding skills: Proficiency in one or more of Go, Java, or Scala, with the ability to work across services, infrastructure, and automation.

  • Architect and executor: Ability to define end-to-end designs, break work into milestones, de-risk early, and deliver high-quality solutions on schedule.

  • Operationally rigorous: Strong understanding of SLOs, failure modes, observability, and incident response, with a focus on designing for safe change and graceful degradation.

  • Great communicator: Ability to write clear design documents, articulate trade-offs effectively, and lead technical discussions with diverse stakeholders, including engineers, product managers, and leadership.

  • Leader without authority: Proven experience leading cross-team initiatives, influencing technical direction beyond immediate ownership, and helping other engineers grow and succeed.

  • Values-aligned: Committed to customer impact, reliability, long-term maintainability, and team success, with a focus on building durable solutions rather than simply shipping features.

Preferred technical and professional experience

  • Experience building control-plane systems, including APIs, operators/controllers, metadata services, and provisioning or orchestration workflows.

  • Background working with Apache Kafka or other streaming and data systems.

  • Experience designing and operating multi-region, high-availability, or disaster recovery architectures.

  • Experience working on security-sensitive infrastructure, including identity, certificates, secrets management, mTLS, policy enforcement, or compliance-driven environments.

  • Contributions to open-source projects, technical blogs, conference presentations, or other forms of technical thought leadership in relevant domains.

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.

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.

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