Staff Software Engineer (Kafka)

Location: Remote within the United States; locations include Poughkeepsie, Lowell, Rochester, Tucson, Research Triangle Park, Armonk, Boston, Bellevue, Atlanta, San Jose, Dallas, Austin, San Francisco, and Seattle.

Salary: $207,000–$314,640 per year.

Company

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

What you will do

• Design and implement query execution, planning, and caching strategies at massive scale.
• Build and maintain multi-tenant, highly available infrastructure for the Realtime Context Engine and Lightning tables.
• Optimize platform scalability, reliability, resilience, and availability across Confluent Cloud.
• Collaborate with product management, design, and engineering teams on storage and infrastructure integration.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree; a master’s degree is preferred.
• Expertise in C++ and/or Rust.
• 3–5 years of professional experience building database technologies.
• Experience building and operating large-scale database systems.
• Experience with distributed systems.
• Must be able to work without current or future visa sponsorship in the United States.

Nice to have

• Experience contributing to Apache Iceberg, Velox, or Substrait.
• Experience with AWS, Azure, or GCP.
• Computer science degree with a specialization in database technologies.

Culture & Benefits

• Healthcare, dental, vision, and mental health benefits.
• 401(k), pension plan, employee stock purchase plan, insurance, and financial counseling.
• Paid holidays, sick time, vacation, parental bonding leave, and other paid care leave.
• AI-driven learning resources, training, and certification opportunities.
• Inclusive employee resource groups, volunteering opportunities, and retail discounts.
• Some travel may be required based on business demand.