Confluent - Staff Software Engineer - 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.

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 cross-team leadership, identifying high-leverage problems and driving them from idea to durable impact.

What You Will Do

• Own end-to-end architecture and delivery of complex control-plane systems (APIs, controllers, orchestration workflows, and data models) that support Confluent Cloud products.
• Lead open-ended technical initiatives by taking ambiguous problems, clarifying requirements, defining the approach, and driving 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 and rollback patterns.
• Collaborate across organizations, including Cloud Platform, Kafka, Compute, Security, Traffic, SRE, and others, to align on designs, trade-offs, and long-term platform direction.
• Mentor and unblock engineers at multiple levels, provide high-quality design and code reviews, and help grow the broader engineering team.
• Continuously improve the developer experience for our control-plane stack through tooling, automation, CI/CD, and test strategy enhancements that reduce toil and increase velocity.
• Influence technical strategy within your domain by identifying high-impact opportunities, proposing roadmaps, and helping prioritize work aligned with business goals.
• Contribute to engineering culture through documentation, design reviews, and knowledge sharing, including internal talks, wikis, and external content where appropriate.

Preferred Education

Master's Degree

Required Technical And Professional Expertise

• 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 hands-on experience with one or more of the following:

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

+ Cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, or Azure) and cloud-native architectures.

+ Kubernetes or similar orchestration platforms.

• Strong systems and coding skills: Proficiency in one or more of Go, Java, or Scala, with the ability to work across services, infrastructure, and automation.
• Architect and executor: Ability to define end-to-end designs, break work into milestones, de-risk early, and deliver high-quality solutions on schedule.
• Operationally rigorous: Strong understanding of SLOs, failure modes, observability, and incident response, with a focus on designing for safe change and graceful degradation.
• Great communicator: Ability to write clear design documents, articulate trade-offs effectively, and lead technical discussions with diverse stakeholders, including engineers, product managers, and leadership.
• Leader without authority: Proven experience leading cross-team initiatives, influencing technical direction beyond immediate ownership, and helping other engineers grow and succeed.
• Values-aligned: Committed to customer impact, reliability, long-term maintainability, and team success, with a focus on building durable solutions rather than simply shipping features.

Preferred Technical And Professional Experience

• Experience building control-plane systems, including APIs, operators/controllers, metadata services, and provisioning or orchestration workflows.
• Background working with Apache Kafka or other streaming and data systems.
• Experience designing and operating multi-region, high-availability, or disaster recovery architectures.
• Experience working on security-sensitive infrastructure, including identity, certificates, secrets management, mTLS, policy enforcement, or compliance-driven environments.
• Contributions to open-source projects, technical blogs, conference presentations, or other forms of technical thought leadership in relevant domains.