**Introduction** A career in IBM Software means you’ll be part of a team that transforms our customer’s challenges into solutions. Seeking new possibilities and always staying curious, we are a team dedicated to creating the world’s leading AI-powered, cloud-native software solutions for our customers. Our renowned legacy creates endless global opportunities for our IBMers, so the door is always open for those who want to grow their career. IBM’s product and technology landscape includes Research, Software, and Infrastructure. Entering this domain positions you at the heart of IBM, where growth and innovation thrive. **Your role and responsibilities** We’re seeking talented software engineers passionate about distributed systems to join our team. If you thrive in designing and optimizing large-scale, multi-threaded distributed systems, this role is an excellent fit. You’ll work alongside our engineering teams to develop Astra, our cloud-native database built on Apache Cassandra®. Our products power mission-critical applications for major organizations worldwide, and your contributions will directly impact their reliability and performance What you will do: * Design and implement new database features with a strong focus on scalability, maintainability, and testability. * Diagnose and resolve complex cloud database issues, delivering improvements and fixes for our customers. * Optimize database performance, high availability, and fault tolerance across multi-region cloud deployments. * Enhance monitoring and observability solutions to track database health, performance metrics, and resource utilization. * Stay ahead of emerging cloud database technologies and best practices to drive continuous innovation **Required technical and professional expertise** * 4-6 years of relevant experience * Experience in distributed systems, concurrency, and large-scale database architectures * Proficiency in Java or C/C++ with an understanding of performance optimization * Hands-on experience with Apache Cassandra® or similar databases * Ability to troubleshoot complex issues in high-availability, high-throughput, fault-tolerant systems * Comfort working in Linux/Unix environments and debugging low-level system behavior **Preferred technical and professional experience** * Knowledge of cloud-native technologies (e.g., Kubernetes, Docker, AWS/Azure/GCP) is a plus. * Contributions to open-source database projects (especially Cassandra ecosystem tools) is a plus. * Experience with database internals (storage engines, query processing, replication) is a plus 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.