Senior Cloud Platform Engineer - Real-Time Data at Scale

IBM; San Diego (CA); On-site; USD 140,000 - 210,000; Full time

Job summary

IBM is seeking an accomplished backend engineer to design and deliver cloud-native systems at scale. You will own critical backend components, drive architectural decisions, and ensure reliability across production services.

You will collaborate with cross-functional teams to implement robust APIs, improve observability, and mentor peers while advancing IBM's AI-powered, cloud-native product platforms. This role emphasizes leadership, coding excellence, and scalable system design.

Qualifications

• 4+ years of experience designing, building, and supporting backend systems in production.
• Strong knowledge of Python runtime environments and package management.
• Proficiency in a major programming language (Python, Go, C/C++, Java, etc.).
• Extensive experience running services in a public cloud (AWS, GCP, or Azure) with containers and orchestration (Docker/Kubernetes).
• Experience with observability, monitoring, incident response, and postmortems.
• Track record of technical leadership, coordinating work across engineers and teams.

Responsibilities

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

Skills

Backend engineering

Python

Cloud platforms

Docker/Kubernetes

Observability

Technical leadership

Software architecture

Education

Master's Degree

Tools

Docker

Kubernetes

AWS

GCP

Azure

Job description

IBM is seeking an accomplished backend engineer to design and deliver cloud-native systems at scale. You will own critical backend components, drive architectural decisions, and ensure reliability across production services.

You will collaborate with cross-functional teams to implement robust APIs, improve observability, and mentor peers while advancing IBM's AI-powered, cloud-native product platforms. This role emphasizes leadership, coding excellence, and scalable system design.