Staff Software Engineer Jobs in Rochester, NY (NOW HIRING)

Staff Software Engineer I – Confluent Infrastructure

Georgia, Minnesota, Texas, New York, North Carolina, Arizona, Washington, Massachusetts, California — United States

Regular full‑time; hybrid work arrangement; some travel may be required.

As a Staff Software Engineer on the Secure Compute Platform team, you will lead the design and evolution of a next‑generation, multi‑tenant, cloud‑native compute platform that safely runs trusted and untrusted workloads at scale. The platform runs on Kubernetes across multiple public clouds and provides a unified abstraction layer for workload execution, lifecycle management, security, and operational excellence.

• Define and drive the technical direction for Secure Compute, including platform architecture, runtime, and security at scale.
• Design and implement platform APIs and Kubernetes controllers/operators (primarily in Go) for workload lifecycle, autoscaling, placement, and isolation.
• Partner with product and platform teams to shape and deliver the roadmap for Secure Compute, enabling new customer‑facing features and internal platforms to build on a common compute substrate.
• Deliver high‑impact initiatives in areas such as workload scheduling, failure and disruption handling, private and public networking patterns, rollout strategies, and fleet‑level resource management.
• Lead technical design reviews and influence architecture across teams, ensuring Secure Compute primitives are easy to adopt, safe by default, and aligned with broader platform strategy.
• Mentor and grow engineers on the team through design guidance, code reviews, pair programming, and sharing best practices for secure, reliable, operable platform development.
• Own operational excellence for key Secure Compute services, including availability, reliability, SLOs, performance, on‑call response, incident management, and disaster recovery.

• Minimum of 10+ years delivering scalable backend or infrastructure software in production; degree in computer science or related field, or equivalent work experience.
• Experience building and operating large‑scale, high‑availability systems; strong problem‑solving skills and ability to work in a fast‑paced environment.
• Deep expertise in Kubernetes, including controller development, operator patterns, and preferably multi‑region or multi‑cluster architectures.
• Strong proficiency in Go, Scala, C++, or other statically typed languages for building production‑grade services and control planes.
• Experience with multi‑tenant platform architectures and security/isolation patterns (namespaces, network policies, sandboxing, secrets, identity management), hands‑on work with secure container runtimes and low‑level Linux internals, and performance troubleshooting and tuning for containerized/virtualized workloads.
• Familiarity with gRPC, Protobuf, and internal platform API design for service‑to‑service communication.
• Experience with public cloud environments (AWS, GCP, Azure) and cloud‑provider integrations.
• Strong collaboration skills and history of working effectively with product, SRE/operations, security, and peer engineering teams. Demonstrated technical leadership and mentorship, including driving cross‑team alignment on architecture and execution.
• Preferred: Experience in storage, compute orchestration, networking, security, or performance engineering; familiarity with Kubernetes, service meshes, and cloud‑native architectures; contributions to open‑source infrastructure projects.

Some travel may be required based on business demand.

• Healthcare benefits including medical, prescription drug coverage, dental, vision, and mental health & wellness.
• Financial programs such as 401(k), cash balance pension plan, Employee Stock Purchase Plan, financial counseling, life insurance, short‑term and long‑term disability, and performance‑based incentive programs.
• Generous paid time off: 12 holidays, minimum 56 hours sick time, 120 hours vacation, 12 weeks parental bonding leave, and other paid care leave per IBM policy.
• Training and educational resources via an AI‑driven learning platform for industry‑recognized certifications.
• Diverse inclusion employee resource groups, giving & volunteer opportunities, and discounts on retail products, services, and experiences.

Compensation range: $161,000 – $299,000 per year, based on experience, skills, and location.

IBM is 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 applicable law. IBM is also committed to compliance with all fair employment practices regarding citizenship and immigration status.

This position does not offer visa sponsorship; applicants must have the ability to work without a need for current or future visa sponsorship.

Date posted: 03-Jul-2026

Job ID: 114261