Staff Software Engineer - Confluent Control Plane Core Infrastructure

Introduction

At IBM Software, we transform client challenges into solutions. Building the world's leading AI-powered, cloud-native products that shape the future of business and society. Our legacy of innovation creates endless opportunities for IBMers to learn, grow, and make an impact on a global scale. Working in Software means joining a team fueled by curiosity and collaboration. You'll work with diverse technologies, partners, and industries to design, develop, and deliver solutions that power digital transformation. With a culture that values innovation, growth, and continuous learning, IBM Software places you at the heart of IBM's product and technology landscape. Here, you'll have the tools and opportunities to advance your career while creating software that changes the world. With Confluent, data doesn't sit still. We put information in motion, streaming in near real time so organizations can react faster, build smarter, and deliver experiences as dynamic as the world around them.

Your role and responsibilities

About the Role:

We're looking for a Staff Software Engineer I to lead the design and delivery of core control-plane infrastructure that powers Confluent Cloud. In this role you will own highly technical projects across multiple services and teams, shaping the architecture and reliability of our cloud platform. You'll combine deep distributed systems expertise with strong execution and crossteam leadership, identifying highleverage problems and driving them from idea to durable impact.

What You Will Do:

• Own endtoend architecture and delivery of complex controlplane systems (APIs, controllers, orchestration workflows, data models) that support Confluent Cloud products.

• Lead openended technical initiatives: take ambiguous problems, clarify requirements, define the approach, and drive execution across teams and services.

• Raise the bar on reliability and operations by building resilient systems with strong observability, clear SLOs, runbooks, and safe rollout/rollback patterns.

• Collaborate across orgs (Cloud Platform, Kafka, Compute, Security, Traffic, SRE and others) to align on designs, tradeoffs, and longterm platform direction.

• Mentor and unblock engineers at multiple levels; provide highquality design and code reviews, and help grow the broader engineering team.

• Continuously improve developer experience for our controlplane stack (tooling, automation, CI/CD, test strategy) to remove toil and increase velocity.

• Influence technical strategy in your domain: identify highimpact opportunities, propose roadmaps, and help prioritize work aligned with business goals.

• Contribute to engineering culture via documentation, design reviews, and knowledge sharing (internal talks, wikis, or external content where appropriate).

This job can be performed from anywhere in the Canada.

Required education

Bachelor's Degree

Preferred education

Master's Degree

Required technical and professional expertise

What You Will Bring:

• Experienced builder: Typically 6+ years of software engineering experience, with a strong track record of delivering complex backend or distributed systems to production.

• Distributed systems & cloud expert: Deep handson experience with at least some of:

• Distributed systems design (consistency models, failure modes, data modeling, scalability).

• Cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, or Azure) and cloudnative architectures.

• Kubernetes or similar orchestration platforms.

• Strong systems and coding skills: Proficiency in one or more of Go, Java or Scala, and comfort working across services, infrastructure, and automation.

• Architect & executor: Able to define endtoend designs, break them into milestones, derisk early, and land them on time with high quality.

• Operationally rigorous: You think in terms of SLOs, failure modes, observability, and incident response; you design for safe change and graceful degradation.

• Great communicator: You write clear design docs, explain tradeoffs crisply, and can lead technical discussions with diverse stakeholders (engineers, PMs, leadership).

• Leader without authority: You've successfully led crossteam projects, influenced technical direction beyond your immediate code, and helped others level up.

• Valuesaligned: You care about customer impact, reliability, longterm maintainability, and helping the team win, not just shipping features.

Preferred technical and professional experience

What Gives You an Edge:

• Experience building controlplane systems (APIs, operators/controllers, metadata services, provisioning/orchestration workflows).

• Background with Apache Kafka or other streaming/data systems.

• Prior work on multiregion, highavailability, or disasterrecovery architectures.

• Experience in securitysensitive infrastructure (identity, certificates, secrets, mTLS, policy) or compliancedriven environments.

• Contributions to open source projects, public talks, or technical blogs in relevant areas.

ABOUT BUSINESS UNIT

IBM Software infuses core business operations with intelligence-from machine learning to generative AI-to help make organizations more responsive, productive, and resilient. IBM Software helps clients put AI into action now to create real value with trust, speed, and confidence across digital labor, IT automation, application modernization, security, and sustainability. Critical to this is the ability to make use of all data, because AI is only as good as the data that fuels it. In most organizations data is spread across multiple clouds, on premises, in private datacenters, and at the edge. IBM's AI and data platform scales and accelerates the impact of AI with trusted data, and provides leading capabilities to train, tune and deploy AI across business. IBM's hybrid cloud platform is one of the most comprehensive and consistent approach to development, security, and operations across hybrid environments-a flexible foundation for leveraging data, wherever it resides, to extend AI deep into a business.

YOUR LIFE @ IBM

In a world where technology never stands still, we understand that, dedication to our clients success, innovation that matters, and trust and personal responsibility in all our relationships, lives in what we do as IBMers as we strive to be the catalyst that makes the world work better.

Being an IBMer means you'll be able to learn and develop yourself and your career, you'll be encouraged to be courageous and experiment everyday, all whilst having continuous trust and support in an environment where everyone can thrive whatever their personal or professional background.

Our IBMers are growth minded, always staying curious, open to feedback and learning new information and skills to constantly transform themselves and our company. They are trusted to provide on-going feedback to help other IBMers grow, as well as collaborate with colleagues keeping in mind a team focused approach to include different perspectives to drive exceptional outcomes for our customers. The courage our IBMers have to make critical decisions everyday is essential to IBM becoming the catalyst for progress, always embracing challenges with resources they have to hand, a can-do attitude and always striving for an outcome focused approach within everything that they do.

Are you ready to be an IBMer?

ABOUT IBM

IBM's greatest invention is the IBMer. We believe that through the application of intelligence, reason and science, we can improve business, society and the human condition, bringing the power of an open hybrid cloud and AI strategy to life for our clients and partners around the world.

Restlessly reinventing since 1911, we are not only one of the largest corporate organizations in the world, we're also one of the biggest technology and consulting employers, with many of the Fortune 500 companies relying on the IBM Cloud to run their business.

At IBM, we pride ourselves on being an early adopter of artificial intelligence, quantum computing and blockchain. Now it's time for you to join us on our journey to being a responsible technology innovator and a force for good in the world.

IBM is proud to be an equal-opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, gender, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, national origin, genetics, pregnancy, disability, neurodivergence, age, or other characteristics protected by the applicable law. IBM is also committed to compliance with all fair employment practices regarding citizenship and immigration status.

OTHER RELEVANT JOB DETAILS

Must have the ability to work in Canada without sponsorship.

This role will involve working with technology that is covered by Export Regulations sanctions. If you are a Foreign National from any of the following US sanctioned countries (Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Syria, and the Crimea, Luhansk, Donetsk, Kherson, and Zaporizhia regions of Ukraine) on a work permit, you are not eligible for employment in this position.

The salary range for the position is based on a full-time schedule. Your ultimate salary within this range may vary depending on your job-related skills and experience for this position.