Senior Cloud Platform Engineer - Real-time Data Lead

IBM; Rochester (MN); On-site; USD 120,000 - 190,000; Full time

Job summary

IBM Software is seeking a senior backend engineer to design and deliver cloud-native data infrastructure and distributed systems. You’ll work across languages and runtimes, lead architectural decisions, and contribute to production- level reliability and performance.

The role emphasizes collaboration, mentorship, and delivering scalable solutions in a fast-paced environment. Expect opportunities to influence architecture and drive operational excellence across teams.

Qualifications

• 4+ years industry 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).
• Experience in public cloud, containers, and orchestration (AWS/GCP/Azure, Docker, Kubernetes).
• Leadership track record coordinating across engineers/teams.
• Strong communication and collaboration skills.
• Experience with observability, metrics, logging, tracing, and postmortems.

Responsibilities

• Own and lead the design and implementation of complex backend services in a cloud-native, microservices-based environment.
• Make architecture decisions that balance reliability, scalability, performance, and operability, and clearly communicate the tradeoffs.
• Drive projects end to end: from requirements and design through implementation, rollout, and ongoing operation in production.
• Improve service reliability and operations by defining SLOs/SLAs, strengthening observability, and participating in on-call as needed.
• Collaborate across teams to define APIs, integration points, and data models that keep the platform coherent and evolvable.
• Identify and drive platform and productivity improvements that raise the bar for the broader engineering organization.
• Mentor and support other engineers through code reviews, design reviews, and technical guidance.
• Contribute to a culture of continuous improvement, inclusive collaboration, and high technical standards.

Skills

Python

Go

C/C++

Java

AWS

GCP

Azure

Kubernetes

Observability

Leadership

Education

Master's degree

Tools

Docker

Kubernetes

Job description

IBM Software is seeking a senior backend engineer to design and deliver cloud-native data infrastructure and distributed systems. You’ll work across languages and runtimes, lead architectural decisions, and contribute to production- level reliability and performance.

The role emphasizes collaboration, mentorship, and delivering scalable solutions in a fast-paced environment. Expect opportunities to influence architecture and drive operational excellence across teams.