Introduction
At IBM Software, we transform client challenges into solutions. Building the world’s leading AI-powered, cloud-native products that shape the future of business and society.
We’re building Astra Serverless, the next generation of distributed, scalable, fault-tolerant, serverless NoSQL data services — powered by Apache Cassandra and extended with native vector and AI capabilities across multi-cloud environments.
Our customers depend on our platform to serve real-time, mission-critical workloads on a global scale. Ensuring reliability, performance, and correctness under unpredictable workloads is a non-trivial challenge — and that’s where you come in.
Your Role And Responsibilities
As a Software Development Engineer in our Cloud Native Database Team, you’ll play a pivotal role in shaping the future of our distributed database platform and the team building it — from architecture and performance design to leadership and mentoring. You’ll work on systems that power mission-critical workloads for enterprises worldwide, helping ensure scalability, resilience, and reliability at a global scale.
Preferred Education
Master’s Degree
Required Technical And Professional Expertise
Lead design and development of advanced database features and distributed services across multi-region, serverless deployments.
Architect and optimize components for scalability, observability, and maintainability in high-throughput, low-latency environments.
Drive performance, availability, and fault tolerance, improving replication, compaction, and storage-layer behavior for large-scale clusters.
Guide and mentor engineers across teams — elevating engineering practices, design quality, and distributed systems craftsmanship.
Collaborate cross-functionally with cloud platform, infrastructure, and quality engineering teams to deliver reliable, automated, and testable systems.
Contribute strategically to technical roadmap discussions and help define the long-term vision for our cloud database architecture.
Stay ahead of innovation in distributed databases, storage systems, and cloud-native technologies — influencing how we evolve Astra DB.
Preferred Technical And Professional Experience
Deep experience designing or operating distributed systems — understanding consistency, replication, partitioning, and fault tolerance.
Strong software engineering skills in Java and the JVM ecosystem or C++ (experience with concurrency, performance profiling, and memory management).
Practical experience with database internals
Proficiency in Linux/Unix environments and debugging large-scale production systems at the lower level.
Proven ability to lead through influence, mentor engineers, and set technical direction.