Confluent Staff Software Engineer II - Secure Compute (Kubernetes/Go)

Location: Remote anywhere in the United States; 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 solutions, including Confluent Cloud data streaming technologies.

What you will do

• Define the technical direction for the Secure Compute platform, including its architecture, runtime, and security model.
• Design and implement Go-based platform APIs, Kubernetes controllers, and operators for workload lifecycle, autoscaling, placement, and isolation.
• Build infrastructure for safely running trusted and untrusted workloads in multi-tenant environments across AWS, Azure, and GCP.
• Deliver improvements to workload scheduling, failure handling, networking, rollout strategies, and fleet-level resource management.
• Lead technical design reviews, influence architecture across teams, and mentor engineers through design guidance, code reviews, and pair programming.
• Own availability, reliability, SLOs, performance, on-call response, incident management, and disaster recovery for key services.

Requirements

• 10+ years of experience delivering scalable backend or infrastructure software in production.
• Experience leading large-scale, highly available, low-latency distributed systems.
• Deep Kubernetes expertise, including controller development, operator patterns, and multi-cluster or multi-region architectures.
• Strong Go proficiency and experience building production-grade services and control planes.
• Experience with multi-tenant architectures, workload isolation, secure container runtimes, Linux internals, identity management, and network policies.
• Experience with observability, operational practices, public cloud platforms, and cross-team technical leadership.

Nice to have

• Master's degree.
• Experience with Kata Containers, Cloud Hypervisor, cgroups, namespaces, or seccomp.
• Experience with gRPC, Protobuf, containerized and virtualized workload optimization, and cloud-provider integrations.
• Strong collaboration with Product, SRE/Operations, Security, and Engineering teams.

Culture & Benefits

• Remote work within the United States with a regular daytime shift.
• Healthcare, dental, vision, mental health, life insurance, disability coverage, and financial programs including 401(k).
• Paid holidays, sick time, vacation, parental bonding leave, and other paid care leave programs.
• AI-driven learning resources, training, and support for professional certifications.
• Employee resource groups, volunteering opportunities, and retail and service discounts.
• Visa sponsorship is not available; the ability to work without current or future visa sponsorship is required.