Staff Software Engineer - Control Plane Core Infrastructure (Cloud Infrastructure)

Location: Remote within the United States; listed locations include Poughkeepsie, Lowell, Rochester, Tucson, Research Triangle Park, Armonk, Boston, Bellevue, Atlanta, Santa Monica, San Jose, Santa Clara, Dallas, Austin, San Francisco, and Seattle. Some travel may be required based on business demand.

Salary: $161,000–$299,000 per year.

Company

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

What you will do

• Own the architecture and delivery of control-plane systems, including APIs, controllers, orchestration workflows, and data models.
• Lead ambiguous, cross-team technical initiatives from requirements clarification through implementation and durable impact.
• Build resilient systems with observability, SLOs, runbooks, safe rollout and rollback patterns, and graceful degradation.
• Collaborate with Cloud Platform, Kafka, Compute, Security, Traffic, SRE, and other organizations on platform direction and design trade-offs.
• Mentor engineers, conduct design and code reviews, and contribute to technical strategy, documentation, and knowledge sharing.
• Improve developer experience through tooling, automation, CI/CD, testing strategy, and reduced operational toil.

Requirements

• Bachelor's degree required; Master's degree preferred.
• Typically 6+ years of software engineering experience delivering complex backend or distributed systems to production.
• Hands-on expertise in distributed systems, cloud platforms such as AWS, GCP, or Azure, and Kubernetes or similar orchestration platforms.
• Proficiency in Go, Java, or Scala, with the ability to work across services, infrastructure, and automation.
• Strong knowledge of SLOs, failure modes, observability, incident response, and safe system changes.
• Experience leading cross-team initiatives, influencing technical direction, communicating design trade-offs, and developing other engineers.

Nice to have

• Experience building control-plane systems, metadata services, operators, provisioning workflows, or orchestration systems.
• Experience with Apache Kafka or other streaming and data systems.
• Experience designing multi-region, highly available, or disaster recovery architectures.
• Experience with security-sensitive infrastructure such as identity, certificates, secrets management, mTLS, policy enforcement, or compliance environments.
• Open-source contributions, technical writing, conference presentations, or related technical thought leadership.

Culture & Benefits

• Full-time regular employment with healthcare, dental, vision, mental health, and insurance benefits.
• 401(k), pension plan, employee stock purchase plan, financial counseling, and performance-based salary incentives.
• Paid holidays, sick time, vacation, parental bonding leave, and other paid care leave programs.
• AI-driven learning resources, training, and industry-recognized certification opportunities.
• Inclusive employee resource groups, volunteer opportunities, and retail and service discounts.