Senior Backend Engineer Cloud-Native Data Platform

International Business Machines Corporation; Boston (KY); On-site; USD 130,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

IBM Confluent is seeking senior backend engineers to design and deliver cloud-native, multi-tenant distributed systems. You will own large-scale services and drive end-to-end delivery, balancing reliability, performance, and operability.

Strong leadership and collaboration are essential to influence architecture and guide teams across the organization. You will work with Python, modern cloud platforms, containers, and Kubernetes to build scalable data infrastructure that enables real-time data

Qualifications

• 7+ years industry experience designing, building, and supporting backend systems in production
• Strong knowledge of Python runtime environments and package management
• Strong programming and algorithmic skills in major languages (Python/Go/C/C++, Java)
• Experience running services in a public cloud with containers and orchestration (Docker, Kubernetes)
• Leadership experience driving projects and coordinating across teams
• Strong communication and collaboration skills, able to align stakeholders
• Experience with observability, metrics, logging, tracing, incident response, and postmortems
• BS, MS, or PhD in computer science or related field, or equivalent work experience

Responsibilities

• Own and lead the design and implementation of complex backend services in a cloud-native, microservices-based environment.
• Make architecture and technical decisions balancing reliability, scalability, performance, and operability; communicate tradeoffs.
• Drive projects end to end from requirements and design through production rollout and operation.
• Improve service reliability by defining SLOs/SLAs, observability, and on-call participation.
• Collaborate across teams to define APIs, integration points, and data models that keep the platform evolvable.
• Identify and drive platform and productivity improvements across tooling, automation, and processes.
• Mentor engineers through code reviews, design reviews, and technical guidance.
• Contribute to a culture of continuous improvement and high technical standards.

Skills

Backend systems

Python

Cloud

Distributed systems

Containers

Kubernetes

Observability

Leadership

Education

BS, MS, or PhD in Computer Science or related field

Tools

Docker

Kubernetes

AWS/GCP/Azure

Job description

IBM Confluent is seeking senior backend engineers to design and deliver cloud-native, multi-tenant distributed systems. You will own large-scale services and drive end-to-end delivery, balancing reliability, performance, and operability.

Strong leadership and collaboration are essential to influence architecture and guide teams across the organization. You will work with Python, modern cloud platforms, containers, and Kubernetes to build scalable data infrastructure that enables real-time data