Senior Principal Engineer, Kafka & Real-Time Streaming

IBM; Boston (MA); On-site; USD 192,000 - 358,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Healthcare benefits

401(k) and financial planning

Parental leave

Continual learning resources

Job summary

IBM Software seeks a Senior Principal Engineer to define the multi-year strategy for the Background Plane within the Next-Gen Kafka architecture. This individual contributor role spans across cloud storage, control planes, and site reliability engineering, with executive-level scope.

You will mentor staff, align senior leaders, and represent IBM’s technical vision externally through talks and publications, while delivering high-impact, scalable infrastructure for thousands of enterprise

Qualifications

• Experience architecting and operating mission-critical distributed systems at planetary scale.
• Deep Kafka internals knowledge or equivalent high-throughput streaming systems.
• Ability to articulate and deliver multi-year architectural roadmaps.
• Strong reasoning about race conditions and distributed concurrency.
• Proven ability to establish SLA/SLO metrics and automated recovery.
• Excellent written and oral communication for executive audiences.
• Mentorship and leadership of staff/principal engineers.

Responsibilities

• Architect Multi-Year Strategy: establish long-term vision for the Background Plane.
• Engineer High-Scale Processing Platforms: design and optimize core platform capabilities.
• Guarantee End-to-End Correctness: own correctness models for data workflows.
• Scale Without Bounds: ensure scalability with sub-millisecond latency for foreground tasks.
• Drive Cross-Organizational Consensus: lead architectural contracts across orgs.
• Raise Operational Excellence: define engineering standards for fault tolerance and observability.
• Serve as Senior Authority: act as technical authority during architectural reviews.
• Elevate Engineering Culture: mentor engineers and represent vision externally.

Skills

Distributed Systems Mastery

Streaming & Storage

Strategic Technical Leadership

Rigorous Problem-Solving

Quality & SRE Rigor

Influential Communication

Talent Multiplier

Education

Bachelor's Degree

Master's Degree

Job description

IBM Software seeks a Senior Principal Engineer to define the multi-year strategy for the Background Plane within the Next-Gen Kafka architecture. This individual contributor role spans across cloud storage, control planes, and site reliability engineering, with executive-level scope.

You will mentor staff, align senior leaders, and represent IBM’s technical vision externally through talks and publications, while delivering high-impact, scalable infrastructure for thousands of enterprise