Senior Software Engineer (Flink Autopilot)

Location: Remote, Germany; based in Ehningen, Baden-Wurttemberg. Some travel may be required based on business demand.

Company

IBM Software develops AI-powered, cloud-native products and hybrid-cloud platforms, including software for data, automation, security, and digital transformation.

What you will do

• Drive complex Autopilot projects from design through production, including autoscaling logic, resource management, and job or task manager resilience.
• Design and implement control loops and coordination logic that handle concurrency, restarts, leader changes, partial failures, consistency, and high availability directly in code.
• Develop deep expertise in one or more Autopilot areas and represent components in cross-functional design and architecture discussions.
• Document failure modes, trade-offs, and correctness arguments through design documents, one-pagers, and proposals.
• Review pull requests and designs, mentor junior engineers and interns, and contribute to interview questions and hiring.
• Communicate technical direction clearly and keep stakeholders informed.

Requirements

• Bachelor's Degree.
• 6–8+ years of relevant experience in stream processing or large-scale distributed systems, with familiarity with autoscaling, resource management, or scheduling in distributed data systems.
• Strong distributed-systems or stream-processing fundamentals and a record of independently designing, building, and shipping complex systems end to end.
• Ability to implement consistency and high availability directly in code by reasoning about concurrency, failure and recovery, state, and coordination without relying on higher-level frameworks for correctness.
• Proficiency in Java and/or Scala, with the ability to contribute production code from day one.
• Hands-on experience building and operating mission-critical systems in a public cloud environment: 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

• Master's Degree.
• Experience implementing low-level reliability mechanisms such as leader election, distributed coordination, reconciliation loops, consensus, or state replication.
• Experience with Kubernetes and operating distributed applications in production.
• Recognized, 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 from Germany with some travel potentially required based on business demand.
• Regular on-call responsibilities.
• Environment focused on innovation, continuous learning, collaboration, feedback, and professional development.
• Equal-opportunity workplace committed to fair employment practices.