Staff Software Engineer, Real-Time AI & Stream Processing

IBM; Boston (MA); Remote; USD 207,000 - 331,000; Full time

Job summary

IBM Software is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to help build Confluent Cloud's AI capability layer on streaming data. You’ll own end-to-end backend services across services, APIs, and control planes, delivering reliable inference at scale.

You will lead cross-team technical work, design robust architectures, and drive responsibilities from design through production. Strong communication and a willingness to operate across Go, Java, and Python are essential.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of significant experience designing, building, and operating distributed systems or cloud-native backend infrastructure in production.
• Strong working knowledge of Kubernetes and distributed-systems patterns (control loops, API servers, high-scale control planes).
• Proficiency in at least one of Go, Java, or Python, and willingness to work across all three.
• A track record of leading cross-team technical work: turning ambiguous requirements into designs others can rally behind.
• Excellent written and verbal communication — you can write a design doc that aligns people who don't report to you.

Responsibilities

• Design and build the backend services (Go/Java/Python) that run AI and model inference on real-time data.
• Own features end to end — drafting the design, aligning stakeholders inside and outside the team, and driving to a conclusion.
• Make technical calls on systems that span teams: model lifecycle, inference routing, and agent execution.
• Own the quality of what you ship — code, test coverage, documentation, operability, and rollout safety.
• Make the engineers around you better through code review, design feedback, and trusted cross-cutting work.
• Participate in on-call for the services your team owns and help keep team rituals healthy.

Skills

Go

Java

Python

Kubernetes

Distributed systems

Cross-team leadership

Design docs

Education

Bachelor's Degree

Master's Degree

Tools

Kubernetes

Job description

IBM Software is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to help build Confluent Cloud's AI capability layer on streaming data. You’ll own end-to-end backend services across services, APIs, and control planes, delivering reliable inference at scale.

You will lead cross-team technical work, design robust architectures, and drive responsibilities from design through production. Strong communication and a willingness to operate across Go, Java, and Python are essential.