Software Engineer - Terraform Foundations

International Business Machines Corporation; Austin (TX); On-site; USD 120,000 - 160,000; Full time

Job summary

IBM Software is seeking a Software Engineer II with an SRE/software background and a focus on release engineering in Austin, TX. You will work on release tooling, observability, and platform reliability, collaborating with multiple teams to ship robust software.

You will contribute to production dashboards, incident response, and performance improvements across databases and services, leveraging Rails, Go, PostgreSQL, Redis, and Sidekiq. A strong, collaborative mindset is essential.

Qualifications

• 3+ years of production experience in SRE, release or backend eng for SaaS.
• Experience with CI/CD pipelines.
• Experience with observability: metrics, logging, alerting, dashboards.

Responsibilities

• Contribute to release safety and reliability.
• Make production measurable with dashboards, SLOs, and alerts.
• Improve the platform across services and databases.
• Participate in incident response and on-call rotation.

Skills

SRE

Release engineering

Backend engineering

CI/CD

Observability

Tools

Ruby on Rails

Go

PostgreSQL

Redis

Sidekiq

Job description

Introduction

At IBM Software, we transform client challenges into solutions. Building the world's leading AI-powered, cloud-native products that shape the future of business and society. Our legacy of innovation creates endless opportunities for IBMers to learn, grow, and make an impact on a global scale. Working in Software means joining a team fueled by curiosity and collaboration. You'll work with diverse technologies, partners, and industries to design, develop, and deliver solutions that power digital transformation. With a culture that values innovation, growth, and continuous learning, IBM Software places you at the heart of IBM's product and technology landscape. Here, you'l have the tools and opportunities to advance your career while creating software that changes the world.

The HCP Terraform Foundations group is made up of SREs and Software Engineers who keep HCP Terraform platform reliable, performant, and robust. Within Foundations, Production Engineering proactively improves the architecture, observability, and operational posture of the platform's foundational services and is Terraform's final escalation point when the platform is in trouble.

We are looking for a Software Engineer II with an SRE/Software background and an interest in release engineering. You will work on the systems every Terraform run depends on, and you will learn how the platform is built, run, and shipped.

Your role and responsibilities

Contribute to release safety and reliability

• Build and improve release pipeline tooling, canary signals, and verification so changes reach production safely.

• Contribute to database migration safety tooling.

Make production measurable

• Build and maintain dashboards, SLOs, and alerts for foundational services.

• Help ensure logs and telemetry reach the observability platform.

Improve the platform

• Deliver well-scoped improvements across Aurora PostgreSQL, Redis, Sidekiq, and Puma.

• Investigate performance bottlenecks and orchestration issues that span multiple services.

Take part in incident response

• Join our 24/7 on-call rotation after a shadowing period.

• Contribute to blameless incident reviews and follow through on the systemic fixes that come out of them.

Work as part of the team

• Partner with Cloud Platform Engineering, Agent Core & Services, Web Engineering, and feature teams.

• Share knowledge through code review and pairing. Improve runbooks, onboarding, and documentation.

• Present your work to the team and its leadership.

Required technical and professional expertise

• 3+ years of production experience in SRE, production engineering, release engineering, or backend engineering for SaaS platforms.

• Experience working with release or deployment pipelines (CI/CD).

• Experience with observability: metrics, logging, alerting, and dashboards.

• Ability to work independently, prioritize your own work, and deliver increasing scope on time and with high quality.

• Clear, empathetic communication and an eagerness to learn through humility and reflection.

Preferred technical and professional experience

• Experience with Ruby on Rails applications and PostgreSQL.

• Experience with Go services, Redis, and Sidekiq.

• Familiarity with cell-based architectures and multi-region deployments.

• Experience operating in regulated or compliance-driven environments, such as FedRAMP.

• Working knowledge of production databases and applications.

• Familiarity with application and infrastructure security best practices.

• Comfort using enterprise-approved generative AI tools, and the habit of critically checking their output.

IBM is committed to creating a diverse environment and is proud to be an equal-opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, gender, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, national origin, caste, genetics, pregnancy, disability, neurodivergence, age, veteran status, or other characteristics. IBM is also committed to compliance with all fair employment practices regarding citizenship and immigration status.