Software Engineer – JVM Platform Engineering

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 are building the next generation of watsonx.data—a GPU-accelerated, open data lakehouse engineered to deliver category-leading price-performance for analytics and AI workloads. Working in Software means joining a team fueled by curiosity and collaboration, where you'll write high-performance Java across query engine components, storage connectors, and coordination services, and own JVM health in production—tuning garbage collection, eliminating memory pressure, and removing latency outliers.

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.

As a Software Engineer with deep Java and JVM expertise, you will design, develop, test, and deliver the performance-critical Java infrastructure that underpins the watsonx.data platform. You will work in an Agile, collaborative environment to understand stakeholder requirements, own JVM health in production, and mentor the broader team on JVM best practices. Your primary responsibilities will include:

• Build High-Performance Java:
  Design, code, and unit test performance-critical components—query engine operators, storage I/O paths, and coordination services—using modern Java and memory-efficient, low-allocation data structures.
• Engineer Concurrency:
  Implement thread-safe, lock-free data structures and parallel pipelines (Fork/Join, Completable Future, virtual threads), eliminating race conditions and deadlocks while adding back pressure and admission control.
• Tune the JVM & GC:
  Profile and tune garbage collection (G1, ZGC, Shenandoah), heap, metaspace, and JIT settings, and allocation hot spots to remove latency outliers in production.
• Contribute to CI/CD & Debug Production:
  Contribute to the automated CI/CD pipeline and unit-test fixes for customer-reported problems; monitor JVM health (JFR, JMX, async-profiler) and resolve crashes, OOMs, and degradations on-call.
• Collaborate in Agile Environment:
  Partner with query engine, storage, and infrastructure teams to resolve JVM bottlenecks, conduct rigorous code reviews, and document tuning and concurrency patterns.

• JVM Engineering
  
  Experience:
  
  6+ years of professional Java engineering, including at least 2 years writing performance-critical or concurrent Java in a production data platform, database, or distributed system.
• Deep Java Expertise:
  Mastery of modern Java (v17+), the memory model, generics, concurrency primitives, and the standard library.
• GC Tuning & Profiling:
  Hands-on JVM garbage-collection tuning (algorithm selection, heap sizing, pause analysis, allocation profiling) and profiling with async-profiler, JFR, JMX, heap dumps, and flame graphs.
• Concurrent Programming:
  Proficiency with java.util.concurrent, Fork/Join, Completable Future, lock-free algorithms, thread-safety analysis, and off-heap or memory-efficient data structures.
• Communication &
  
  Education:
  
  Clear written communication—able to document tuning decisions and explain JVM behavior to non-experts; comfort in large Java codebases;
  Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent practical experience.

• Modern JVM Projects & Internals:
  Experience with Project Loom and Project Panama in production, plus JVM internals (JIT C1/C2/GraalVM, escape analysis, scalar replacement) and GraalVM native image trade-offs.
• OSS & Acceleration:
  Contributions to high-performance Java open source (Presto/Trino, Spark, Flink, Cassandra, Kafka), exposure to Kotlin or Scala, GPU/CUDA experience.

IBM is committed to creating a diverse environment and is proud to be an equal-opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, gender, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, national origin, caste, genetics, pregnancy, disability, neurodivergence, age, veteran status, or other characteristics. IBM is also committed to compliance with all fair employment practices regarding citizenship and immigration status.