Principal Software Engineer, Cloud Resilience & Observability

International Business Machines Corporation; Boston (KY); On-site; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) seeks a Principal Software Engineer to own the CAR team's architectural direction for large-scale, multi-cloud data streaming platforms. You will drive resiliency, observability, and operator tooling while partnering with Confluent R&D teams to shape system design.

You will lead with a focus on reliability, scalability, and regulatory considerations, and collaborate across engineering, product, and customer-facing teams to deliver impactful,

Qualifications

• Proven track record designing, operating, and improving highly available distributed systems at cloud scale.
• Expertise in metrics, logs, traces, alerting, and SLOs for large telemetry platforms.
• Ability to model complex service interactions and set scalable standards and guardrails.
• Strong technical leadership to drive adoption of engineering standards across teams.
• Excellent written communication and ability to explain tradeoffs clearly.
• Hands-on software development skills across one or more languages.

Responsibilities

• Define architectural patterns and standards that enable systemic resiliency across multi-cloud data streaming platforms.
• Shape the observability stack and governance for metrics, logs, traces, and alerting, balancing cost and signal quality.
• Lead engineering efforts, collaborating with teams to implement operator tooling and guardrails for reliable operations.

Skills

Reliability engineering

Observability

Distributed systems

Cloud architecture

AI-assisted operations

Leadership

Writing & communication

Hands-on software development

Education

Master's Degree

Tools

OpenTelemetry

Prometheus

Grafana

Apache Kafka

Druid

Job description

International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) seeks a Principal Software Engineer to own the CAR team's architectural direction for large-scale, multi-cloud data streaming platforms. You will drive resiliency, observability, and operator tooling while partnering with Confluent R&D teams to shape system design.

You will lead with a focus on reliability, scalability, and regulatory considerations, and collaborate across engineering, product, and customer-facing teams to deliver impactful,