Sr Software Engineer - Terraform Foundations

HITEC; Raleigh (NC); On-site; USD 150,000 - 210,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Healthcare benefits

401(k) plan

Paid time off

Learning resources

Diversity & inclusivity groups

Job summary

IBM Software is seeking a Senior Software Engineer II with an SRE background to help build and operate a reliable Terraform platform. You will own release pipelines, improve observability, and design scalable architectures across distributed systems.

You’ll participate in 24/7 on-call rotations, lead incident reviews, and mentor teams while collaborating with Cloud Platform Engineering and Web Engineering groups.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of production experience in SRE, production engineering, or software engineering for large-scale SaaS platforms.
• Hands-on experience building and operating release and deployment pipelines, including progressive delivery, canaries, and rollback.
• Strong observability experience: metrics, tracing, logging, SLOs, and alerting for distributed systems.
• A track record of leading complex, cross-team technical initiatives to completion.
• Clear, empathetic communication and a commitment to blameless, learning-focused practices.

Responsibilities

• Improve release safety and reliability by leading work on release pipelines and canary signals.
• Make production measurable through deep observability, SLOs, alerting, and log delivery.
• Evolve architecture ahead of scale for services like Aurora PostgreSQL, Redis, Sidekiq, and Puma.
• Lead incident response with 24/7 on-call rotation and blameless postmortems.
• Lead across teams, mentor engineers, and communicate technical direction to diverse audiences.

Skills

SRE experience

Release pipelines

Observability

Cross-team leadership

Tools

Ruby on Rails

PostgreSQL

Go services

Redis

Sidekiq

Job description

Additional Cities: Raleigh, Austin

Additional States: Texas, North Carolina

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 Senior Software Engineer II with an SRE background, experience building distributed systems at scale, and a strong interest in release engineering. You will work on the systems every Terraform run depends on, and you will help raise how safely and confidently we ship changes to production.

Your role and responsibilities

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.

Required education

None

Preferred education

None

Required technical and professional expertise

• 8+ years of production experience in SRE, production engineering, or software engineering for large-scale SaaS platforms.
• Hands-on experience building and operating release and deployment pipelines, including progressive delivery, canaries, and rollback.
• Strong observability experience: metrics, tracing, logging, SLOs, and alerting for distributed systems.
• A track record of leading complex, cross-team technical initiatives to completion.
• Clear, empathetic communication and a commitment to blameless, learning-focused practices.

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.
• Recognized subject-matter expertise, such as internal talks, publications, or open- and inner-source contributions.
• Fluency with enterprise-approved generative AI tools, and the judgment to critically assess AI-generated output.
• Working knowledge of production databases and applications, including how data stores behave under load.

ABOUT BUSINESS UNIT

IBM Software infuses core business operations with intelligence-from machine learning to generative AI to help make organizations more responsive, productive, and resilient. IBM Software helps clients put AI into action now to create real value with trust, speed, and confidence across digital labor, IT automation, application modernization, security, and sustainability. Critical to this is the ability to make use of all data, because AI is only as good as the data that fuels it. In most organizations data is spread across multiple clouds, on premises, in private datacenters, and at the edge. IBM's AI and data platform scales and accelerates the impact of AI with trusted data, and provides leading capabilities to train, tune and deploy AI across business. IBM's hybrid cloud platform is one of the most comprehensive and consistent approach to development, security, and operations across hybrid environments- a flexible foundation for leveraging data, wherever it resides, to extend AI deep into a business.

YOUR LIFE @ IBM

In a world where technology never stands still, we understand that, dedication to our clients success, innovation that matters, and trust and personal responsibility in all our relationships, lives in what we do as IBMers as we strive to be the catalyst that makes the world work better.

Being an IBMer means you’ll be able to learn and develop yourself and your career, you’ll be encouraged to be courageous and experiment everyday, all whilst having continuous trust and support in an environment where everyone can thrive whatever their personal or professional background.

Our IBMers are growth minded, always staying curious, open to feedback and learning new information and skills to constantly transform themselves and our company. They are trusted to provide on-going feedback to help other IBMers grow, as well as collaborate with colleagues keeping in mind a team focused approach to include different perspectives to drive exceptional outcomes for our customers. The courage our IBMers have to make critical decisions everyday is essential to IBM becoming the catalyst for progress, always embracing challenges with resources they have to hand, a can-do attitude and always striving for an outcome focused approach within everything that they do.

Are you ready to be an IBMer?

ABOUT IBM

IBM’s greatest invention is the IBMer. We believe that through the application of intelligence, reason and science, we can improve business, society and the human condition, bringing the power of an open hybrid cloud and AI strategy to life for our clients and partners around the world.

Restlessly reinventing since 1911, we are not only one of the largest corporate organizations in the world, we’re also one of the biggest technology and consulting employers, with many of the Fortune 500 companies relying on the IBM Cloud to run their business.

At IBM, we pride ourselves on being an early adopter of artificial intelligence, quantum computing and blockchain. Now it’s time for you to join us on our journey to being a responsible technology innovator and a force for good in the world.

IBM 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, genetics, pregnancy, disability, neurodivergence, age, or other characteristics protected by the applicable law. IBM is also committed to compliance with all fair employment practices regarding citizenship and immigration status.

OTHER RELEVANT JOB DETAILS

IBM offers a competitive and comprehensive benefits program. Eligible employees may have access to:

• Healthcare benefits including medical & prescription drug coverage, dental, vision, and mental health & well being
• Financial programs such as 401(k), cash balance pension plan, the IBM Employee Stock Purchase Plan, financial counseling, life insurance, short & long- term disability coverage, and opportunities for performance based salary incentive programs
• Generous paid time off including 12 holidays, minimum 56 hours sick time, 120 hours vacation, 12 weeks parental bonding leave in accordance with IBM Policy, and other Paid Care Leave programs. IBM also offers paid family leave benefits to eligible employees where required by applicable law
• Training and educational resources on our personalized, AI-driven learning platform where IBMers can grow skills and obtain industry-recognized certifications to achieve their career goals
• Diverse and inclusive employee resource groups, giving & volunteer opportunities, and discounts on retail products, services & experiences

We consider qualified applicants with criminal histories, consistent with applicable law.

IBM will not be providing visa sponsorship for this position now or in the future. Therefore, in order to be considered for this position, you must have the ability to work without a need for current or future visa sponsorship.

The compensation range and benefits for this position are based on a full-time schedule for a full calendar year. The salary will vary depending on your job-related skills, experience and location. Pay increment and frequency of pay will be in accordance with employment classification and applicable laws. For part time roles, your compensation and benefits will be adjusted to reflect your hours. Benefits may be pro-rated for those who start working during the calendar year.