Staff Software Engineer - Infrastructure (Kubernetes)

Location: Remote within 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 and hybrid-cloud products, including Confluent Cloud capabilities for real-time data streaming.

What you will do

• Define the technical direction, architecture, runtime capabilities, and security models for the Secure Compute platform.
• Design and implement platform APIs, Kubernetes controllers, and operators primarily in Go.
• Build workload lifecycle management, autoscaling, placement, isolation, scheduling, networking, and rollout capabilities.
• Partner with Product, SRE/Operations, Security, and Engineering teams to deliver the Secure Compute roadmap.
• Lead design reviews, influence cross-team architecture, and mentor engineers through technical guidance and code reviews.
• Own reliability, performance, SLOs, on-call operations, incident response, and disaster recovery for critical services.

Requirements

• 10+ years of experience delivering scalable backend, infrastructure, or platform software in production.
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
• Experience building and operating large-scale, highly available distributed systems.
• Deep Kubernetes expertise, including controller development, operator patterns, and multi-region or multi-cluster architectures.
• Strong proficiency in Go, Scala, C++, or another statically typed programming language, plus production service and control-plane development experience.
• Experience with multi-tenant security and isolation, secure container runtimes, Linux internals, containerized workloads, gRPC, Protobuf, platform APIs, and AWS, Google Cloud Platform, and Microsoft Azure.

Nice to have

• Experience with storage systems, computer orchestration, networking, security engineering, or performance engineering.
• Familiarity with service meshes and modern cloud-native architectures.
• Contributions to open-source infrastructure or cloud-platform projects.
• Master’s degree.

Culture & Benefits

• Regular full-time employment with healthcare, dental, vision, mental-health, and insurance benefits.
• 401(k), pension, employee stock purchase, financial counseling, and performance-based incentive programs.
• Paid holidays, sick time, vacation, parental bonding leave, and other paid-care leave programs.
• AI-driven learning resources, training, and industry-recognized certification opportunities.
• Diverse employee resource groups, volunteer opportunities, and product and service discounts.
• Visa sponsorship is not available now or in the future; candidates must be able to work without current or future sponsorship.