Join IBM Software to build world-leading AI-powered, cloud-native products that shape the future of business and society. Our team fosters curiosity and collaboration, offering endless opportunities to learn, grow, and make a global impact. You'll work with diverse technologies to design and deliver solutions powering digital transformation, with a culture that values innovation and continuous learning.

This role is at the heart of IBM's product and technology landscape, providing the tools and opportunities to advance your career while creating software that changes the world.

As a Senior Software Engineer, you will own the execution and delivery of projects within the ksqlDB product. Develop deep expertise in areas like pull queries, state stores, and elastic scaling, confidently addressing stakeholder questions.

Contribute to design discussions, offering technical leadership through code reviews and architectural improvements. Ship features and fixes with a customer-centric approach, proactively enhancing how ksqlDB serves streaming-SQL use cases. Participate in on-call incident response, diagnose issues, maintain runbooks, and drive retrospectives.

Collaborate cross-functionally to align technical work with business needs, contributing to team OKRs. Mentor junior engineers, actively participate in code reviews, and assist in interviewing as the team expands.

We seek candidates with strong Java proficiency, a solid foundation in data structures, algorithms, concurrency, and distributed systems fundamentals, as the ksqlDB/Kafka Streams codebase is JVM-based.

Requires 3–6 years of professional software engineering experience building and operating backend/distributed systems in production. You should be adept at designing, testing, and debugging features within a large codebase, adhering to existing architecture and code-health practices.

Familiarity with cloud-native operations, including containers/Kubernetes, observability (metrics/logs/traces), and on-call practices is essential. Excellent written and verbal communication skills are crucial for clear design documentation, constructive code reviews, and effective cross-functional collaboration.