Staff Software Engineer I (L5A) – Confluent Cloud Platform – Control Plane

Location: Remote within Canada. Cities listed include Bedford, Calgary, Markham, Toronto, and Vancouver. Some travel may be required based on business demand.

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

Company

IBM Software develops AI-powered, cloud-native and hybrid cloud products for enterprise digital transformation.

What you will do

• Own the architecture and delivery of complex control-plane systems, including APIs, controllers, orchestration workflows, and data models.
• Lead ambiguous, open-ended technical initiatives across multiple services and engineering teams.
• Build resilient systems with observability, SLOs, runbooks, and safe rollout and rollback patterns.
• Collaborate with Cloud Platform, Kafka, Compute, Security, Traffic, SRE, and other organizations on designs and platform direction.
• Mentor engineers, conduct design and code reviews, and improve developer experience through tooling, automation, CI/CD, and testing.
• Shape technical strategy, roadmaps, prioritization, documentation, and knowledge sharing for the control-plane domain.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree required; a master’s degree is preferred.
• 8+ years of software engineering experience delivering complex backend or distributed systems to production.
• Hands-on expertise in distributed systems design, cloud platforms such as AWS, GCP, or Azure, and Kubernetes or similar orchestration platforms.
• Proficiency in one or more of Go, Java, or Scala, with experience across services, infrastructure, and automation.
• Experience designing for reliability, observability, SLOs, failure handling, incident response, safe change, and graceful degradation.
• Must be able to work in Canada without sponsorship. Foreign nationals from specified US-sanctioned countries or regions working on a permit are not eligible for this position.

Nice to have

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

Culture & Benefits

• Work on mission-critical infrastructure used by thousands of customers in production.
• Collaborate with senior and staff engineers across Cloud Platform, Kafka, and Compute.
• Influence the architecture, reliability, and developer experience of Confluent Cloud’s control plane.
• Environment focused on ownership, operational excellence, innovation, continuous learning, and one-team collaboration.
• Regular daytime shift with a remote work arrangement.