Original job description
About The Company
IBM is a global technology company helping organizations address complex challenges through software, cloud services, and artificial intelligence. At IBM Software, teams build AI-powered, cloud-native products that support business transformation and create new opportunities for clients and communities. IBM’s culture emphasizes curiosity, collaboration, continuous learning, and responsible innovation. Employees work across technologies, industries, and markets, with opportunities to develop their skills and contribute to products used around the world.
About The Role
IBM is seeking a Senior Software Engineer to help develop and operate the cloud compute platform for IBM Confluent. The platform supports data-in-motion applications and services, including Apache Kafka, Connect, and Apache Flink. This is an opportunity to shape a multi-tenant, multi-cloud, cloud-native compute environment that enables customers to build and run streaming applications at scale.
You will lead technical work across the software lifecycle, from architecture and design through implementation, production rollout, and ongoing operations. The role calls for an engineer who can make sound decisions about reliability, scalability, performance, security, and operability, while working closely with teams across the organization. You will also help improve how engineering teams build, deploy, monitor, and support services.
Qualifications
Candidates should have at least seven years of industry experience designing, building, and supporting production backend systems. A bachelor’s, master’s, or doctoral degree in computer science or a related discipline is preferred; equivalent professional experience will also be considered.
Required qualifications include strong programming and algorithmic skills and proficiency in a major programming language such as Python, Go, C, C++, or Java. Candidates should understand Python runtime environments, including virtual environments, package management, and interpreter configuration. Experience operating services on AWS, Google Cloud, or Microsoft Azure, together with containers and orchestration technologies such as Docker and Kubernetes, is expected.
Applicants should demonstrate technical leadership, clear communication, and the ability to coordinate projects across engineers or teams. Experience with observability and production operations - including metrics, logging, tracing, incident response, and postmortems - is important. Familiarity with JVM, WebAssembly, or other language runtimes is an asset, as is hands-on expertise in distributed systems, container sandboxing, and large-scale, low-latency services. Experience supporting critical systems through an on-call rotation is preferred.
Applicants must be authorized to work in Canada without sponsorship. The position involves technology subject to export regulations and sanctions; eligibility may be restricted for certain foreign nationals working under permits.
Responsibilities
Lead the design and development of complex backend services in a cloud-native, microservices-based environment. Make and communicate architectural decisions that balance service reliability, scalability, performance, and operational requirements. Guide projects from requirements and technical design through implementation, release, and production support.
Strengthen service operations by establishing and improving service-level objectives and agreements, observability, incident response, capacity planning, and resilience practices. Contribute to availability, disaster recovery, security, and performance improvements for the compute platform. Collaborate with partner teams to define APIs, integrations, and data models that keep the platform consistent and adaptable.
Identify opportunities to improve engineering productivity through automation, tooling, and processes. Support colleagues through code and design reviews, mentoring, and technical guidance. Promote inclusive collaboration, continuous improvement, sound documentation, and high engineering standards.
Benefits
IBM offers the opportunity to work on foundational cloud and data infrastructure alongside experienced, collaborative teams. Employees can grow through continuous learning, meaningful technical challenges, and opportunities to influence product architecture and engineering practices. Compensation is based on a full-time schedule and may vary according to job-related skills and experience. Specific benefits and compensation details are provided during the hiring process.
Equal Opportunity
IBM is committed to building a diverse and inclusive workforce. Employment decisions are based on qualifications, skills, and business needs, in accordance with applicable laws. IBM welcomes candidates who bring different perspectives and experiences and is dedicated to providing an environment where employees can contribute, develop, and succeed.
