Sr Software Engineer - Terraform Foundations

International Business Machines Corporation; Boston (MA); On-site; USD 150,000 - 210,000; Full time

Job summary

IBM in Boston seeks a senior platform reliability engineer to lead release pipelines, canaries, and verification so changes reach production safely. You will drive observability for core services, including SLOs, alerting, and log delivery.

You will design deep improvements across the stack, spot scale pressures before incidents, plan capacity, and lead incident reviews in a blameless culture. You’ll mentor engineers and improve runbooks, onboarding, and cross-team collaboration.

Responsibilities

• Lead release pipelines, canary signals, and verification so changes reach production safely.
• Drive observability for foundational services, including SLOs, alerting, and log delivery.
• Design and deliver technically deep improvements across Aurora PostgreSQL, Redis, Sidekiq, and Puma.
• Spot scale pressures before they become incidents, and plan capacity accordingly.
• Lead incident response with 24/7 on-call rotation and blameless reviews; mentor engineers and improve runbooks/onboarding.

Job description

Improve release safety and reliability

• Lead work on release pipelines, canary signals, and verification so changes reach production safely.
• Help make database migrations safer and more self-service for application teams.

Make production measurable

• Drive deep observability for foundational services, including SLOs, alerting, and log delivery.
• Turn production signals into prioritized, systemic fixes.

Evolve the architecture ahead of scale

• Design and deliver technically deep improvements across Aurora PostgreSQL, Redis, Sidekiq, and Puma.
• Spot scale pressures before they become incidents, and plan capacity accordingly.

Lead incident response

• Take part in our 24/7 on-call rotation and serve as a senior escalation point.
• Lead incident reviews so no production failure recurs without a systemic fix, in a blameless and psychologically safe environment.

Lead across teams and grow others

• Lead cross-team initiatives, working closely with Cloud Platform Engineering, Agent Core & Services, Web Engineering, and feature teams.
• Mentor engineers through code review, pairing, and design feedback. Improve our runbooks, onboarding, and documentation.
• Present technical direction and outcomes to technical and non-technical audiences.