Developer - Incident Command

Position: Staff Developer - Incident Command
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  Confluent Cloud processes millions of events per second across AWS, GCP, and Azure. When incidents happen in a multi-cloud streaming platform, they happen at scale—data in motion, exactly-once semantics, and cascading failure modes that require deep systems thinking. We need an expert-level engineer who can drive proactive reliability improvements that prevent these incidents before they occur.
This role combines hands-on technical work with strategic program ownership. You'll spend roughly 75% of your time on engineering: building automation, improving tooling, analyzing systemic failure patterns, and designing reliability improvements. The remaining 25% is teaching and coordination: coaching teams through post-mortems, training incident commanders, and evolving our incident response practices.
You’ll be part of a global team with follow-the-sun coverage, with clean handoffs that keep everyone working sustainable hours. This role sits within Cloud Architecture and Reliability - Supportability, a horizontal team that owns reliability standards and tooling across engineering. You're the person who makes us need incident management less.

What You Will Do   Analyze systemic failure patterns and design reliability improvements that prevent incident recurrence
Own Rootly configuration, workflows, and integrations with Pager Duty, Jira, Confluence, and Slack
Define and maintain SLO/SLA frameworks; use error budgets to guide reliability investments
Own standards, practices, and continuous improvement of incident response across engineering
Edit and review customer-facing incident documents (CRCAs) to ensure quality and clarity
Develop and deliver training programs; coach teams through post-mortems
Partner with engineering leaders to elevate reliability practices org-wide
Deep experience with observability: metrics, logging, tracing
Kubernetes and container orchestration experience
Understanding of CI/CD pipelines and release processes
Strong written communication (design docs, runbooks, post-mortems)
Experience driving org-wide process and cultural changes
Preferred Education  Master's Degree
Required Technical And Professional Expertise   10+ years of relevant experience in SRE, incident management, or reliability engineering
Cloud experience with at least one of AWS, GCP, or Azure (we run all three)
Experience navigating reliability/incident programs at 500+ engineer organizations
Deep expertise with incident management tooling (Rootly, Pager Duty, or similar)
Strong understanding of distributed systems and failure modes at scale
Kafka/event streaming expertise preferred, or demonstrated rapid mastery of complex systems
Preferred Technical And Professional Experience   Advanced Cloud Knowledge:

Experience with cloud-based infrastructure and its application in reliability and resiliency engineering.
Specialized Scripting

Skills:

Proficiency in scripting languages and automation tools to optimize system reliability and performance.