Senior Backend Engineer - Data Streaming & Metadata

IBM; Markham; On-site; GBP 90,000 - 130,000; Full time

Job summary

IBM Software in the UK is seeking a Senior Software Engineer II to own backend systems powering Confluent data streaming across multi-cloud and on-prem environments. You will design, build, and operate resilient services at scale, collaborating across regions and teams to enable fast, reliable data motion.

You will contribute to code quality, testing, documentation, and incident response while mentoring others and driving initiatives that improve performance and reliability.

Qualifications

• 6+ years of backend experience in production systems.
• Proficiency in a major language (Go or similar).
• Experience with distributed data stores (DynamoDB, Cosmos, Spanner, Cassandra, or similar).
• Experience with at least one major cloud (AWS, GCP, or Azure).
• Observability and operational excellence (SLOs, on-call, incident response).
• Strong engineering practices — code review, testing, and documentation.

Responsibilities

• Build and evolve the metadata platform — the read, write, and streaming APIs.
• Solve hard distributed-systems problems — availability, consistency, sharding, scaling.
• Design, build, and operate resilient, scalable systems across a stack spanning multiple clouds and services.
• Independently drive projects — spot high-impact gaps.

Skills

Backend design

Go programming

Concurrency control

Distributed data stores

Cloud platforms

Observability

Ownership & velocity

Engineering practices

Education

Master’s Degree

Tools

Kubernetes

Kafka

Job description

IBM Software in the UK is seeking a Senior Software Engineer II to own backend systems powering Confluent data streaming across multi-cloud and on-prem environments. You will design, build, and operate resilient services at scale, collaborating across regions and teams to enable fast, reliable data motion.

You will contribute to code quality, testing, documentation, and incident response while mentoring others and driving initiatives that improve performance and reliability.