Staff Software Engineer - Cloud Platform – Control Plane

Location: Remote in Canada. The role is based in Calgary, Markham, Toronto, Vancouver, Ottawa, or Montreal, with some travel potentially required. Applicants must be able to work in Canada without sponsorship. Foreign nationals from Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Syria, or the Crimea, Luhansk, Donetsk, Kherson, and Zaporizhia regions of Ukraine working on a permit are not eligible.

Salary: CAD 180,200–229,200 per year on a full-time schedule.

Company

IBM Software develops AI-powered, cloud-native, hybrid cloud, and data platforms for business and technology transformation.

What you will do

• Own the architecture, design, and delivery of control plane systems, including APIs, controllers, orchestration workflows, and data models for Confluent Cloud products.
• Lead complex technical initiatives across multiple services and engineering teams, defining requirements, evaluating trade-offs, and establishing technical direction.
• Build resilient platforms with strong observability, defined SLOs, runbooks, safe deployments, rollback mechanisms, and graceful degradation.
• Collaborate with Cloud Platform, Kafka, Compute, Security, Traffic, SRE, and other engineering organizations.
• Mentor engineers, conduct design and code reviews, and raise engineering standards.
• Improve developer productivity through tooling, automation, CI/CD pipelines, testing strategies, and operational workflows.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree and typically 8+ years of software engineering experience delivering complex backend or distributed systems to production.
• Hands-on expertise in distributed systems design, cloud-native architectures, and AWS, GCP, or Azure.
• Experience with Kubernetes or similar orchestration platforms.
• Proficiency in one or more of Go, Java, or Scala, with the ability to work across services, infrastructure, and automation.
• Experience defining end-to-end designs, leading cross-team projects, and communicating technical trade-offs to diverse stakeholders.
• Operational experience with SLOs, failure modes, observability, incident response, and safe system changes.

Nice to have

• Experience building control plane systems, metadata services, operators/controllers, or provisioning workflows.
• Apache Kafka or other streaming and data systems experience.
• Multi-region, high-availability, or disaster-recovery architecture experience.
• Security-sensitive infrastructure or compliance-driven environment experience.
• Open-source contributions, public talks, or technical writing.

Culture & Benefits

• Remote work arrangement within Canada.
• Continuous learning, career development, and technical growth opportunities.
• Collaboration across diverse technologies, partners, industries, and engineering organizations.
• Some business travel may be required.