Staff Software Engineer - Confluent Cloud Traffic Engineering

**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** Confluent has pioneered a fundamentally new category of data infrastructure focused on data in motion. Have you ever found a new favorite series on Netflix, picked up groceries curbside at Walmart, or paid for something using Square? That’s the power of data in motion—giving organizations instant access to the massive amounts of data that is constantly flowing throughout their business. At Confluent, we’re building the foundational platform for this new paradigm of data infrastructure. Our cloud-native offering is designed to be the intelligent connective tissue enabling real-time data, from multiple sources, to constantly stream across the organization. With Confluent, organizations can create a central nervous system to innovate and win in a digital-first AI world. We’re looking for self-motivated team members who crave a challenge and feel energized to roll up their sleeves and help realize Confluent’s enormous potential. Chart your own path and take healthy risks as we solve big problems together. We value having diverse teams and want you to grow as we grow—whether you’re just starting out in your career or managing a large team, you’ll be amazed at the magnitude of your impact. About the Role: To realize Confluent’s enormous potential, we are looking for software engineers, at various levels, to grow our Traffic team which is responsible for building and managing the networking fabric of Confluent Cloud. Cloud networking is a strategic investment area for Confluent with the potential to impact the company’s top and bottom line. The data plane area in the Traffic team focuses on the performance, security, reliability, and cost optimizations for all traffic that ingresses and egresses a customer's Kafka cluster on Confluent Cloud. We are looking for someone with an interest in building large-scale distributed systems, with a focus on building and managing network data planes for containerized workloads in the cloud. The ideal candidate would be passionate about network data plane performance, scale, cost optimizations, and building robust software. What you will do: * Build the software underpinning the mission-critical Confluent Cloud network data plane platform. You will play a crucial role in architecting, designing, developing and operationalizing high performance, scalable, reliable and resilient systems. * Deliver high impact to the business by driving important technical initiatives in areas comprising (but not limited to) networking, cloud infrastructure, and multi-tenancy. * Independently drive execution of software projects as well as technically lead a team of engineers to deliver impact in production with a focus on quality. * Build upon open source software and engage with upstream community to deliver business impact. * Troubleshoot issues and improve ops for complex technical stack that spans all the 3 clouds and includes microservices, containers, and virtualization. This job can be performed from anywhere in the US **Required technical and professional expertise** * 8+ years of relevant cloud infrastructure/cloud networking experience * Strong fundamentals in distributed systems design and development * Experience building and operating large-scale systems * Solid understanding of basic systems operations (storage, network, operating systems, etc.) * Proficiency in C++, Go, Python, or other statically typed languages * Experience/knowledge with public clouds (AWS, Azure, or GCP) * Experience building and managing Layer 7 proxies, especially cloud-native proxies such as Envoy **Preferred technical and professional experience** * Open source contributions to CNCF projects * Experience with Kubernetes Networking * Strong networking background combined with your software engineering experience * Education in computer science or a related field, or equivalent work experience IBM is committed to creating a diverse environment and 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, caste, genetics, pregnancy, disability, neurodivergence, age, veteran status, or other characteristics. IBM is also committed to compliance with all fair employment practices regarding citizenship and immigration status.