Senior Software Engineer (FlinkSQL)

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

Company

IBM Software develops AI-powered, cloud-native and hybrid-cloud products for business, data, automation, security, and sustainability.

What you will do

• Design and implement improvements to Flink SQL components, including the planner, parser, optimizer, type system, and runtime.
• Own projects end to end from design and implementation through testing, rollout, documentation, operational readiness, and follow-up.
• Improve the reliability, maintainability, scalability, and performance of cloud-native SQL systems for batch and streaming workloads.
• Strengthen production readiness through observability, automation, tooling, incident follow-up, and technical-debt reduction.
• Collaborate with product and engineering teams to translate customer needs into technical solutions.
• Contribute to Apache Flink and support other engineers through code reviews, design feedback, knowledge sharing, and mentoring.

Requirements

• 5–7+ years of industry experience building backend services, data infrastructure, or distributed systems.
• Strong computer science fundamentals, including data structures, algorithms, concurrency, and distributed systems.
• Expertise in Java or another JVM language such as Scala, with experience contributing to large existing codebases.
• Solid SQL and relational-concepts knowledge, with familiarity with databases, query engines, or stream processors.
• Experience operating services on at least one major public cloud: AWS, GCP, or Azure.
• Ability to own production code, including metrics, dashboards, alerts, testing, safe rollouts, and on-call participation.

Nice to have

• Experience with Apache Flink SQL, the Table API, Spark SQL, Trino, or database engines.
• Familiarity with query planners, optimizers, compiler construction, or Apache Calcite.
• Understanding of event time, watermarks, CDC handling, Apache Kafka, Schema Registry, Avro, or Protobuf.
• Open-source contributions in streaming, databases, or distributed systems.
• Experience with Kubernetes-based environments.

Culture & Benefits

• Remote work arrangement associated with the Germany-based role.
• Regular collaboration with engineers, product managers, partner teams, and the broader open-source community.
• Continuous learning, career development, feedback, and mentoring.
• Some travel may be required according to business needs.
• On-call participation is part of the role.