Confluent - Staff Software Engineer - Control Plane Core Infrastructure

IBM Software builds AI-powered, cloud-native products that help transform client challenges into business and societal solutions. The Staff Software Engineer I will lead the architecture and delivery of core control-plane infrastructure powering Confluent Cloud, driving complex distributed-systems initiatives, reliability improvements, cross-team collaboration, and technical leadership.

Responsibilities:

• 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

Requirements:

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

• Proficiency in one or more of Go, Java, or Scala, with the ability to work across services, infrastructure, and automation
• Ability to define end-to-end designs, break work into milestones, de-risk early, and deliver high-quality solutions on schedule
• Strong understanding of SLOs, failure modes, observability, and incident response, with a focus on designing for safe change and graceful degradation
• Ability to write clear design documents, articulate trade-offs effectively, and lead technical discussions with diverse stakeholders, including engineers, product managers, and leadership
• Proven experience leading cross-team initiatives, influencing technical direction beyond immediate ownership, and helping other engineers grow and succeed
• Committed to customer impact, reliability, long-term maintainability, and team success, with a focus on building durable solutions rather than simply shipping features
• Master's Degree
• 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