Staff Software Engineer I - Confluent Cloud Platform (United Kingdom) in Winchester

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.

Your role and responsibilities:

• We are looking for a staff level technical leader to help us build the next‑generation network data plane to enable our Confluent Cloud platform to achieve 10x the current scale.
• This is a hybrid engineering role, blending deep software development expertise with hands‑on operational excellence.
• The Traffic team is responsible for the network platform of Confluent Cloud with a focus on performance, security, reliability, and cost optimizations for all network traffic.
• You will architect, design and lead cross‑team initiatives to deliver highly scalable, cost efficient, networking data plane solutions.
• You’ll work across engineering, security, product, and platform orgs to deliver building blocks that empower product teams to integrate networking seamlessly.

What You Will Do:

• Design, develop, and operationalize high-performance, scalable, reliable, and resilient systems for the Confluent Cloud network data plane platform.
• Independently drive the execution of ambiguously scoped cross-team software projects, ensuring the delivery of complex projects in production with a focus on quality.
• Troubleshoot and improve operations for a complex technical stack that spans across AWS, Azure, and GCP, including microservices, containers, and virtualization.

Required technical and professional expertise:

• BS, MS, or PhD in Computer Science or a related field, or equivalent work experience.
• Extensive experience in the software engineering industry.
• Strong fundamentals in distributed systems design and development.
• Experience in building and operating large-scale systems.
• Solid understanding of networking primitives and protocols.
• Self‑starter with the ability to work effectively in teams.
• Proficiency in C++, Go, Python, or other programming languages.

Preferred technical and professional experience:

• Experience with Kubernetes.
• Experience with network proxies and/or load balancers.
• Experience with public clouds (AWS, Azure, or GCP).

IBM Software infuses core business operations with intelligence—from machine learning to generative AI to help make organizations more responsive, productive, and resilient.

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.

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.