Staff Rust Engineer — Scalable Distributed Backend

IBM; Kraków; On-site; PLN 350,000 - 650,000; Full time

Job summary

IBM Software in Kraków seeks a Staff Software Engineer with strong Rust expertise to design and build scalable backend and infrastructure systems. You will work with senior engineers to shape architecture, drive performance, and ensure reliability.

You will mentor teams, influence technical direction, and contribute to distributed data pipelines and cloud-native platforms. This role emphasizes high-quality software and cross-team collaboration in a fast-paced environment.

Qualifications

• Strong professional experience developing production software using Rust.
• Track record of delivering complex systems projects with large scope, including multi-quarter design and development initiatives.
• Strong experience with distributed systems, backend infrastructure, cloud platforms, networking, storage or databases or other large-scale systems.
• 4+ years driving Staff-level or equivalent technical initiatives across multiple teams, systems or components.
• Experience designing and implementing scalable, reliable and high-performance software systems.
• Strong understanding of software architecture, system design and engineering best practices.

Responsibilities

• Drive complex technical projects that require strong software engineering skills and architectural judgement.
• Design and develop high-performance systems in Rust focusing on scalability, reliability, maintainability and operational excellence.
• Provide technical leadership across teams, set technical direction and influence architecture and engineering decisions.
• Mentor senior engineers and help the team improve engineering practices and design principles.
• Insist on high standards for software quality, performance, reliability and maintainability.
• Collaborate with product management and stakeholders to translate requirements into robust solutions.
• Drive reliability, observability and performance improvements across systems.
• Contribute to technical design discussions and communicate complex trade-offs clearly.
• Contribute to open source projects and communities where relevant.

Skills

Rust

Distributed systems

Backend engineering

Cloud platforms

Kubernetes

Apache Kafka

Performance optimization

Mentoring engineers

Education

Master's Degree

Tools

Apache Kafka

Kubernetes

Docker

Cloud platforms

Job description

IBM Software in Kraków seeks a Staff Software Engineer with strong Rust expertise to design and build scalable backend and infrastructure systems. You will work with senior engineers to shape architecture, drive performance, and ensure reliability.

You will mentor teams, influence technical direction, and contribute to distributed data pipelines and cloud-native platforms. This role emphasizes high-quality software and cross-team collaboration in a fast-paced environment.