Description

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

IBM is 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. We are hiring a Performance Engineer to be a hands-on focused on measuring, defending, and improving the performance and cost‑per‑performance of the platform across every release.

You will run the benchmarks, build the harnesses, and operate the backing infrastructure that the entire watsonx.data organization relies on to characterize performance. That includes the dedicated benchmark labs, GPU and CPU test fleets, dataset stores, result warehouses, and the automation that ties them together. Engineering, product, field, and competitive intelligence will all consume what you produce: regression signals in CI, executive scorecards, customer-facing dashboards, and the data behind claims that we are the market-leading open lakehouse.

Benchmarking & Workload Engineering

• Industry-standard benchmarks: Run, maintain, and continuously improve reproducible benchmarks across watsonx.data configurations and against competitive offerings.

• Customer-representative workloads: Build and curate workload suites that reflect real customer query mixes, data volumes, concurrency profiles, and freshness requirements: not just synthetic benchmarks.

• Reproducibility & rigor: Ensure every published result is reproducible end-to-end: controlled environments, pinned versions, locked datasets, documented methodology, variance analysis, and statistically defensible reporting.

• Cost-per-performance metrics: Operationalize the canonical price‑performance KPIs ($/query, $/TB scanned, $/training‑token, queries/sec/$, TCO at workload mix); instrument workloads, collect data, and produce repeatable scorecards.

Performance Observability & Analysis

• Telemetry pipeline: Build and maintain the metrics, traces, profiles, GPU/CPU utilization, query plan, and IO telemetry that flow from benchmark runs into the performance data store.

• Dashboards & scorecards: Develop dashboards that surface trends, regressions, and competitive position to engineering, leadership, and external audiences.

• Regression gates: Operate performance regression gates in CI/CD; triage failures, file and drive issues with engine, storage, and GPU teams, and verify fixes.

• Root-cause analysis: Drill into slow queries and GPU/CPU bottlenecks using profilers (Nsight, perf, async-profiler, pprof, flamegraphs) and query plan inspection to pinpoint regressions and improvement opportunities.

Backing Infrastructure for Performance

• Performance environment ownership: Own the lifecycle of the dedicated performance environment(s) supporting watsonx.data: GPU and CPU clusters, networking, storage, and the orchestration that schedules workloads onto them.

• Test fleet automation: Build and maintain infrastructure-as-code (Terraform/Ansible/Helm) for provisioning, configuring, and resetting test environments deterministically across on-prem hardware and cloud (IBM Cloud and partner clouds).

• Benchmark harness platform: Develop and operate the benchmark harness itself: job scheduler, run orchestration, dataset provisioning, result capture, artifact storage, and the API/CLI other teams use to launch runs.

• Dataset & result warehouse: Own the curated datasets used for benchmarking and the warehouse of historical results that powers trend analysis, regression detection, and competitive comparisons.

• Capacity & utilization: Manage capacity and utilization of the performance lab so concurrent campaigns from different teams (query engine, storage, GPU acceleration, AI) run cleanly and without interference.

• Self-service for engineers: Provide engineers across watsonx.data with self-service paths to run standardized perf experiments against well-known baselines, lowering the cost of evidence-based engineering decisions.

Collaboration & Reporting

• Pair with engineers on the query engine, storage, GPU acceleration, catalog, and AI/RAG paths to land performance improvements and verify their impact.

• Produce data, charts, and write-ups that feed internal quarterly scorecards and external performance whitepapers, blog posts, and analyst briefings.

• Participate in design reviews and code reviews where performance is at stake; flag risks early and propose measurable acceptance criteria.

• Document workloads, harnesses, lab usage, and results so the next engineer internal or external: can reproduce what you ran.

Required education

Bachelor's Degree

Required technical and professional expertise

• 8+ years of professional software engineering experience with at least 2 years focused on performance engineering, benchmarking, or SRE for a data platform, database, distributed system.
• Strong programming skills in at least one of Python, Go, Java, plus comfort with shell scripting and modern automation tooling.
• Working knowledge of at least one modern analytics engine (Presto/Trino, Spark, DuckDB, ClickHouse, or comparable) and at least one open table format (Iceberg, Delta, or Hudi).
• Hands-on experience with at least some of: Linux performance tooling (perf, ftrace, eBPF), profilers (Nsight, async-profiler, pprof), and query plan analysis.
• Infrastructure-as-code fluency in at least one of Terraform, Ansible, Pulumi, or Helm; comfort writing and maintaining the automation, not just consuming it.

Preferred technical and professional experience

• Hands-on experience with GPU-accelerated data processing (RAPIDS/cuDF, Velox/Theseus‑class engines, CUDA) and the GPU memory hierarchy (HBM, NVLink, PCIe trade‑offs).
• Experience publishing or co-authoring peer-reviewed or industry-recognized performance results (TPC, MLPerf, ClickBench, LST‑Bench, or similar).
• Experience operating a multi-tenant performance lab or shared test fleet where multiple teams ran experiments concurrently.
• Experience building bespoke benchmark harnesses or workload generators, including dataset generation at TB+ scale.
• Familiarity with vector search, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), and AI inference/training performance characterization.
• Familiarity with FinOps and cloud unit economics—translating raw performance numbers into $/performance and TCO conclusions.
• Contributions to relevant open-source projects (Iceberg, Trino, Spark, Arrow, Velox, RAPIDS, OpenTelemetry, perf-tooling, etc.).
• Hands-on experience designing and running performance experiments : controlling for variance, isolating variables, and producing clear, defensible results.
• Experience operating real infrastructure: Linux servers, Kubernetes, container runtimes, networking basics, and object storage.
• Comfort with observability tooling: metrics (Prometheus), tracing/telemetry (OpenTelemetry), and dashboards (Grafana or equivalent).

ABOUT BUSINESS UNIT

IBM Software infuses core business operations with intelligence—from machine learning to generative AI—to help make organizations more responsive, productive, and resilient. IBM Software helps clients put AI into action now to create real value with trust, speed, and confidence across digital labor, IT automation, application modernization, security, and sustainability. Critical to this is the ability to make use of all data, because AI is only as good as the data that fuels it. In most organizations data is spread across multiple clouds, on premises, in private datacenters, and at the edge. IBM's AI and data platform scales and accelerates the impact of AI with trusted data, and provides leading capabilities to train, tune and deploy AI across business. IBM's hybrid cloud platform is one of the most comprehensive and consistent approach to development, security, and operations across hybrid environments—a flexible foundation for leveraging data, wherever it resides, to extend AI deep into a business.

YOUR LIFE @ IBM

In a world where technology never stands still, we understand that, dedication to our clients success, innovation that matters, and trust and personal responsibility in all our relationships, lives in what we do as IBMers as we strive to be the catalyst that makes the world work better.

Being an IBMer means you'll be able to learn and develop yourself and your career, you'll be encouraged to be courageous and experiment everyday, all whilst having continuous trust and support in an environment where everyone can thrive whatever their personal or professional background.

Our IBMers are growth minded, always staying curious, open to feedback and learning new information and skills to constantly transform themselves and our company. They are trusted to provide on-going feedback to help other IBMers grow, as well as collaborate with colleagues keeping in mind a team focused approach to include different perspectives to drive exceptional outcomes for our customers. The courage our IBMers have to make critical decisions everyday is essential to IBM becoming the catalyst for progress, always embracing challenges with resources they have to hand, a can-do attitude and always striving for an outcome focused approach within everything that they do.

Are you ready to be an IBMer?

ABOUT IBM

IBM's greatest invention is the IBMer. We believe that through the application of intelligence, reason and science, we can improve business, society and the human condition, bringing the power of an open hybrid cloud and AI strategy to life for our clients and partners around the world.

Restlessly reinventing since 1911, we are not only one of the largest corporate organizations in the world, we're also one of the biggest technology and consulting employers, with many of the Fortune 500 companies relying on the IBM Cloud to run their business.

At IBM, we pride ourselves on being an early adopter of artificial intelligence, quantum computing and blockchain. Now it's time for you to join us on our journey to being a responsible technology innovator and a force for good in the world.

IBM 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, genetics, pregnancy, disability, neurodivergence, age, or other characteristics protected by the applicable law. IBM is also committed to compliance with all fair employment practices regarding citizenship and immigration status.

OTHER RELEVANT JOB DETAILS

IBM offers a competitive and comprehensive benefits program. Eligible employees may have access to:

- Healthcare benefits including medical & prescription drug coverage, dental, vision, and mental health & well being

- Financial programs such as 401(k), cash balance pension plan, the IBM Employee Stock Purchase Plan, financial counseling, life insurance, short & long- term disability coverage, and opportunities for performance based salary incentive programs

- Generous paid time off including 12 holidays, minimum 56 hours sick time, 120 hours vacation, 12 weeks parental bonding leave in accordance with IBM Policy, and other Paid Care Leave programs. IBM also offers paid family leave benefits to eligible employees where required by applicable law

- Training and educational resources on our personalized, AI-driven learning platform where IBMers can grow skills and obtain industry-recognized certifications to achieve their career goals

- Diverse and inclusive employee resource groups, giving & volunteer opportunities, and discounts on retail products, services & experiences

We consider qualified applicants with criminal histories, consistent with applicable law.

This position was posted on the date cited in the key job details section and is anticipated to remain posted for 21 days from this date or less if not needed to fill the role.

IBM will not be providing visa sponsorship for this position now or in the future. Therefore, in order to be considered for this position, you must have the ability to work without a need for current or future visa sponsorship.

The compensation range and benefits for this position are based on a full-time schedule for a full calendar year. The salary will vary depending on your job-related skills, experience and location. Pay increment and frequency of pay will be in accordance with employment classification and applicable laws. For part time roles, your compensation and benefits will be adjusted to reflect your hours. Benefits may be pro-rated for those who start working during the calendar year.

Job Title

Lakehouse Performance Engineer

Date posted

03-Jun-2026

Job ID

116597

City / Township / Village

Austin

State / Province

Texas

Country

United States

Work arrangement

Hybrid

Area of work

Software Engineering

Employment type

Regular

Contract type

Regular

Projected Minimum Salary per year

161,000.00

Projected Maximum Salary per year

299,000.00

Position type

Professional

Travel required

No Travel

Company

(0147) International Business Machines Corporation

Shift

General (daytime)

Is this role a commissionable/sales incentive based position?

No



erp5z7ybl