Principal Engineer, Stream Governance & Metadata

IBM; City of Poughkeepsie (NY, AR); On-site; USD 170,000 - 260,000; Full time

Job summary

IBM Software is seeking a Principal Engineer to shape the governance layer of a data streaming platform. You will lead architecture for schema management, metadata consistency, and policy enforcement to support scalable, reliable real-time processing.

You will influence across product and engineering leaders, mentor senior engineers, and contribute to open-source initiatives while delivering high-impact, company-wide outcomes in a cloud-native environment.

Qualifications

• Proven track record leading architecture and delivery of large-scale distributed systems with company impact.
• Deep knowledge of fault tolerance, consistency, scalability, and cloud-native platforms.
• Experience with streaming or event-driven architectures and related governance systems.
• Ability to navigate ambiguity, reduce complexity, and forecast trends for 3–5 years.
• Strong influencing ability with executives and cross-team stakeholders.

Responsibilities

• Define and drive company-level technical strategy for governance systems.
• Architect metadata management systems for low-latency lookups and strong consistency.
• Design data protection capabilities including encryption and access control.
• Build and maintain highly available, multi-tenant governance infrastructure.
• Establish engineering standards and architectural patterns across teams.
• Collaborate with executives, product and engineering leadership to align technical vision.
• Mentor senior and staff engineers and promote open-source contributions.
• Represent the company externally through talks and thought leadership.

Skills

Distributed systems

Leadership

Cloud-native

Open source

Mentorship

Education

Master's degree

Tools

AWS

GCP

Azure

Job description

IBM Software is seeking a Principal Engineer to shape the governance layer of a data streaming platform. You will lead architecture for schema management, metadata consistency, and policy enforcement to support scalable, reliable real-time processing.

You will influence across product and engineering leaders, mentor senior engineers, and contribute to open-source initiatives while delivering high-impact, company-wide outcomes in a cloud-native environment.