Senior Software Engineer - Platform Infrastructure (Remote USA)

We’re not just building better tech. We’re rewriting how data moves and what the world can do with it. With Confluent, data doesn’t sit still. Our platform puts information in motion, streaming in near real-time so companies can react faster, build smarter, and deliver experiences as dynamic as the world around them.

It takes a certain kind of person to join this team. Those who ask hard questions, give honest feedback, and show up for each other. No egos, no solo acts. Just smart, curious humans pushing toward something bigger, together.

One Confluent. One Team. One Data Streaming Platform.

About The Role We are seeking a Senior Software Engineer II to architect, build, and operate services that are core to the company’s cloud infrastructure and product platforms. This is a hybrid engineering role, blending deep software development expertise with hands-on operational excellence.

You will design highly scalable platform services (authentication, authorization, identity, secrets management, policy enforcement, security telemetry pipelines, etc.), while also ensuring these systems are reliable, observable, and resilient in production. You’ll work across engineering, security, compliance, and platform orgs to deliver secure-by-default building blocks that empower product teams to integrate security seamlessly.

What You Will Do

• Architect, design, and develop platform services with a strong focus on scalability, security, and developer experience.
• Lead operational design for reliability: build comprehensive observability, monitoring, and incident response automation into security-critical services.
• Build automation and tooling to drive self-healing systems, proactive risk detection, failure recovery, and continuous resilience testing.
• Collaborate with compliance, governance, and risk teams to translate regulatory and policy requirements into scalable technical controls.
• Lead technical design reviews, security architecture reviews, and incident postmortems for platform-level incidents.
• Mentor engineers across multiple disciplines on both security and operational best practices.
• Own end-to-end delivery of services: from initial design and development through deployment, production hardening, and lifecycle maintenance.

What You Will Bring

• 6+ years of experience in software engineering, SRE, or security engineering roles, with significant experience operating security platform services.
• Strong backend software development experience (Go, Java, Rust, Python).
• Expertise with distributed systems, cloud infrastructure (AWS, GCP, Azure), Kubernetes, service mesh, and container orchestration.
• Strong understanding of security domains: IAM, OAuth2, OIDC, PKI, secrets management, policy engines, audit pipelines, zero trust architecture.
• Experience building highly reliable, observable, and resilient production systems.
• Operational expertise: SLOs, SLIs, error budgets, on-call leadership, incident management.
• Strong collaboration skills to drive alignment across engineering, security, and compliance stakeholders.
• Excellent communication skills with ability to influence technical and business leaders.
• BS, MS, or PhD in computer science or a related field, or equivalent work experience.

What Gives You An Edge

• Experience with SPIFFE/SPIRE, OPA/Gatekeeper, Envoy, Istio, and workload identity management.
• Exposure to security compliance frameworks (FedRAMP).
• Experience leading cross-org security platform architecture initiatives.

Ready to build what's next? Let’s get in motion. Come As You Are Belonging isn’t a perk here. It’s the baseline. We work across time zones and backgrounds, knowing the best ideas come from different perspectives. And we make space for everyone to lead, grow, and challenge what’s possible.

We’re proud to be an equal opportunity workplace. Employment decisions are based on job-related criteria, without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, veteran status, or any other classification protected by law.

Privacy Statement Confluent is an IBM subsidiary which has been acquired by IBM and will be integrated into the IBM organization. By proceeding with this application, you understand that Confluent will share your personal information with other IBM affiliates involved in your recruitment process, wherever these are located. More Information on how IBM protects your personal information, including the safeguards in case of cross-border data transfer, are available here.

Compensation Range: $192,200 - $225,810