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. Our legacy of innovation creates endless opportunities for IBMers to learn, grow, and make an impact on a global scale. Working in Software means joining a team fueled by curiosity and collaboration. You'll work with diverse technologies, partners, and industries to design, develop, and deliver solutions that power digital transformation. With a culture that values innovation, growth, and continuous learning, IBM Software places you at the heart of IBM's product and technology landscape. Here, you'll have the tools and opportunities to advance your career while creating software that changes the world.
Your Role And Responsibilities
Astra DB is a NoSQL Database running on the Cloud, and it is internally powered by Apache Cassandra.
In Astra DB we run datasets of hundreds of Terabytes of data, with super low latency, both for writes and for reads.
The Astra DB Query and Storage team contributes to improve Astra DB in the following areas:
- Indexing: building high performance and storage-effective indexes
- Improving quering features in Cassandra
- Vector Search (foundation for GenAI applications)
- Disk formats (data, metadata and indexes)
- Compaction and storage optimization
- In-memory data structures to improve performance and reduce resources utilization.
- Coaching and Tiered Storage
You are going to be part of the Astra DB Query and Storage team, that is responsible on everything around how Astra stores and accesses data.
The main goal is to improve Cassandra and Astra to make it more and more efficient.
What You Will Do
- Contribute to desigining and implementing new features
- Improve existing code
- Investigate system behavior (profiles, flamegraphs, metrics...) and provide solutions to improve efficiency or to solve perfomance issues
- Collaborate to find the best data structures and disk formats to support existing and new features
- Run and operate the sofware on Kubernetes and on the Cloud: while we don't work on production system directly, Astra is a based on Kubernetes and runs on all the major Clouds, so we run and test everything there
- Collaborate with Production Engineering to support investigating and solving issues in production system
Preferred Education
Master's Degree
Required Technical And Professional Expertise
- Demonstrated professional experience in software
- Ability to develop in Java, C++ or similar programming languages
- Comfortable handing problems related to concurrency and distributed computing
- Familiarity with bug tracking tools, version control tools, build automation tools and test automation tools.
- Passion in solving hard problems: performance, protocols, storage, IO, distributed computing
Preferred Technical And Professional Experience
- Some experience with Cassandra or other database technologies
- Expertise about JVM (Java Virtual Machine) performance best-practices
- Experience in troubleshooting performance issues in software and/or in cloud services
- Experience with Linux or other Unix-like systems
