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
As a Software Developer: Generalist, you will design, develop, test, and deliver offerings using leading-edge and/or proven technologies. You will work in an Agile, collaborative environment to understand stakeholder requirements and contribute to the development of innovative software solutions. Your primary responsibilities will include:
- Lead the technical design and implementation of applications and backend services.
- Collaborate with architects, product managers, and stakeholders to understand functional and non-functional requirements.
- Design, develop, and maintain secure, scalable, and high-performance Java + Spring Boot microservices.
- Build robust REST APIs with OAuth2, OIDC, JWT, and mTLS, ensuring secure coding standards and compliance requirements are met.
- Design and implement event-driven architectures using Kafka and asynchronous messaging patterns.
- Optimize PostgreSQL and MongoDB schemas, indexing strategies, query performance, and multi-tenancy capabilities.
- Contribute to LLM/AI integration initiatives, including backend integration of AI/GenAI services and APIs.
- Deploy, monitor, and troubleshoot applications on Kubernetes/OpenShift, ensuring strong observability through metrics, tracing, logging, and monitoring frameworks.
- Lead technical discussions, perform code reviews, and enforce engineering standards, clean code practices, and architectural guidelines.
- Mentor and guide engineers through technical coaching, debugging support, and design reviews.
- Collaborate with cross-functional teams to translate product requirements into technical solutions and implementation plans.
- Own quality throughout the software lifecycle by designing for testability and contributing to unit, integration, and end-to-end testing.
- Participate in production support, L3 incident analysis, root cause analysis (RCA), and long-term remediation planning.
- Troubleshoot complex technical, performance, and architectural issues.
- Evaluate and recommend tools, frameworks, and emerging technologies to improve engineering productivity and platform capabilities.
- Drive continuous improvements in CI/CD, observability, performance, scalability, and engineering efficiency.
Required Technical And Professional Expertise
- 8+ years of backend software engineering experience in enterprise or high-scale product environments.
- Strong expertise in software design principles, OOP, design patterns, and distributed systems.
- Strong programming experience in Java with exposure to Go or Python.
- Expertise in Java (11/17/21+), Spring Boot, Spring Security, and Spring Data.
- Hands-on experience building microservices architectures and distributed backend systems.
- Strong knowledge of security fundamentals, including TLS/mTLS, PKI/certificates, OAuth2, OIDC, JWT, and encryption in transit/at rest.
- Experience with Docker, Kubernetes, and familiarity with Red Hat OpenShift (OCP).
- Experience with SQL and NoSQL databases, including performance optimization and schema design.
- Strong debugging, troubleshooting, and problem-solving skills.
- Practical experience integrating LLM/AI APIs or Generative AI capabilities into backend systems.
- Solid understanding of data structures, algorithms, networking fundamentals, and system design.
- Experience with Agile development practices, CI/CD pipelines, and engineering collaboration tools.
- Strong communication and stakeholder collaboration skills.
Preferred Technical And Professional Experience
- Experience designing developer productivity tools, including static code analysis or parsing frameworks.
- Exposure to cryptography concepts, Java cryptographic APIs (JCA), and awareness of quantum computing impacts on cryptographic standards.
- Experience building IDE plugins/extensions for tools such as VS Code, IntelliJ, or Eclipse.
- Hands-on experience with AI orchestration frameworks and protocols, including LangChain, LangGraph, MCP (Model Context Protocol), and A2A protocols.
- Experience with Generative AI model tuning, fine-tuning, or small language model customization for enterprise applications.
- Familiarity with security and compliance standards, including FIPS/NIST.
- Cloud-native development experience across IBM Cloud, AWS, Azure, or GCP.
- Experience with observability platforms, performance tuning, and scalability optimization strategies.
- Contributions to open-source projects are a plus.
