Principal Cloud Reliability Engineer

International Business Machines Corporation; San Diego (CA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

IBM Software is seeking a Principal Software Engineer for the Cloud Architecture and Reliability (CAR) team. You will be a technical authority ensuring a large-scale, multi-cloud data streaming platform stays up, recovers fast, and provides operator tools for continued data flow.

You will work across Confluent R&D teams to shape architecture and tooling, delivering high resilience, observability, and scalable systems.

Qualifications

• Proven track record of designing, operating, and improving highly available distributed systems at cloud scale.
• Ability to model service interactions, build standards and guardrails for scalable architectures.
• Expertise in metrics, logs, traces, alerting, and SLOs; experience with telemetry platforms at high volume.

Responsibilities

• Define architectural patterns that create systemic resiliency for large-scale cloud services.
• Design and shape observability platforms and tooling (metrics, logs, traces) with OpenTelemetry/Prometheus.
• Lead and influence engineers to adopt standards and drive reliability improvements.

Skills

Reliability engineering

Systems thinking

Observability fundamentals

Technical leadership

Written communication

Hands-on software development

Education

Master's Degree

Tools

Apache Druid

OpenTelemetry

Prometheus

Grafana

Distributed tracing

Job description

IBM Software is seeking a Principal Software Engineer for the Cloud Architecture and Reliability (CAR) team. You will be a technical authority ensuring a large-scale, multi-cloud data streaming platform stays up, recovers fast, and provides operator tools for continued data flow.

You will work across Confluent R&D teams to shape architecture and tooling, delivering high resilience, observability, and scalable systems.