Senior Software Engineer - Flink Autopilot (Apache Flink)

Location: Remote from Germany; based in Ehningen, Baden-Württemberg. Some travel may be required, and the role includes on-call responsibilities.

Company

IBM Software develops AI-powered, cloud-native and hybrid-cloud products, including platforms for data, automation, security and application modernization.

What you will do

• Drive complex Flink Autopilot projects from system design through production.
• Build autoscaling, resource-management and resilience control loops for Confluent Cloud stream processing.
• Implement consistency, high availability and fault tolerance directly in code across concurrency, crashes, restarts, leader changes and partial failures.
• Develop deep expertise in a system area and represent components in design and architecture discussions.
• Document failure modes, trade-offs and correctness arguments through design documents and proposals.
• Review code and designs, mentor junior engineers and interns, and contribute to hiring and technical direction.

Requirements

• Bachelor's degree; a Master's degree is preferred.
• 6–8+ years of relevant experience in stream processing or large-scale distributed systems.
• Strong experience independently designing, building and shipping complex systems end to end.
• Ability to implement concurrency, state, coordination, consistency, recovery and high availability directly in production code.
• Proficiency in Java and/or Scala, plus hands-on experience operating mission-critical systems in AWS, GCP or Azure.
• Ability to own a technical area, make sound trade-offs and align a small group on technical direction.

Nice to have

• Experience implementing leader election, distributed coordination, reconciliation loops, consensus or state replication.
• Production experience with Kubernetes and distributed applications.
• Impactful open-source contributions to stream-processing projects, particularly Apache Flink.
• Experience with Go in a cloud control-plane context.

Culture & Benefits

• Remote work arrangement with travel based on business demand.
• Opportunity to work on AI-powered, cloud-native and hybrid-cloud software.
• Continuous learning, career development and feedback-oriented collaboration.
• Inclusive environment focused on innovation, trust and personal responsibility.