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

We are seeking a Senior Software Engineer to own and evolve core platform systems spanning knowledge ingestion, memory architecture, evaluation infrastructure, and gateway data management. This role has deep architectural ownership across Rust- and Go-based services and directly impacts search quality, model evaluation, compliance, and platform extensibility.

What You'll Own

Knowledge Base & Memory (Rust)

• Design and evolve the data schema and ingestion pipeline supporting large-scale documentation corpora, including document extraction, segmentation, and hybrid search (BM25 + vector).
• Improve corpus quality through deduplication, relevance tuning, quality scoring, source-of-truth tracking, and versioned corpus management.
• Own the memory architecture across working, semantic, and observational memory tiers, designing retrieval that is context-aware and budget-conscious.
• Evolve federated search capabilities, including multi-KB querying, relevance tuning, embedding model selection, and quality metrics.
• Build and scale an evaluation curation system for an LLM-as-judge framework, including versioned eval datasets, regression baselines, and authoring tooling.

Gateway Data Management (Go / Rust)

• Design and implement a schema-driven entity registry with YAML-defined schemas, enabling new infrastructure connectors without code changes.
• Own declarative state machine configuration decoupled from hardcoded logic.
• Design a domain-agnostic evidence model to support audit and compliance requirements (e.g., PCI-DSS, SOX).
• Formalize metadata and provenance tracking across entities, including import/export and multi-connector support.

Evaluation Infrastructure (Go)

• Extend evaluation frameworks for end-to-end coverage across composable pipelines.
• Design eval schemas, dataset management tooling, and regression thresholds.
• Partner with other teams on shared benchmarks, test corpora, and multi-model evaluation strategy.
• Track and report model quality metrics to support production deployment decisions.

What the First 90 Days Look Like

Month 1: Onboard onto the Rust and Go services. Understand the knowledge base ingestion pipeline end-to-end: document download, extraction, chapter splitting, indexing, federated search. Run the eval framework, review existing eval cases, understand the LLM-as-judge scoring rubric. Identify quality issues in the current documentation corpus.

Month 2: Ship the entity registry refactor — dynamic entity registration with YAML schema definitions. Design the eval curation system — dataset versioning, case authoring tooling, regression baseline management. Begin expanding eval corpus coverage.

Month 3: Ship the evidence model schema. Implement eval curation tooling. Begin knowledge base quality improvements — deduplication, source-of-truth tracking, relevance tuning. Establish eval quality dashboard with cross-model comparison.

Required education

High School Diploma/GED

Preferred education

Bachelor's Degree

Required technical and professional expertise

· Data modeling instincts. You think naturally about schemas, entity relationships, state machines, and how data evolves over time. You've designed data models that other engineers build against.

· Information retrieval or search experience. You've worked with search indexing, document processing, corpus management, or similar — you understand how to make unstructured data findable and useful.

· You can ship across languages. This role works in both Rust and Go. You don't need to be an expert in both, but you need to be productive in at least one and willing to learn the other.

· Quality measurement mindset. You've built or worked with evaluation systems, quality metrics, regression detection, or A/B testing infrastructure. You understand how to measure whether something is getting better or worse.

Preferred technical and professional experience

You don't need all of these coming in. The team will bring you up to speed:

· IBM Z domain knowledge — the documentation sets, infrastructure concepts, and operational patterns that the knowledge base serves

· LLM evaluation methodology — rubric-based scoring, LLM-as-judge patterns, baseline regression, multi-model comparison

· Our knowledge base ingestion pipeline (document extraction, chunking, vector + full-text indexing)

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

Senior Engineer - Data, Schema & Knowledge Systems

Date posted

14-Apr-2026

Job ID

109019

City / Township / Village

LOWELL, San Jose, Austin

State / Province

Texas, Massachusetts, California

Country

United States

Work arrangement

Hybrid

Area of work

Software Engineering

Employment type

Regular

Contract type

Regular

Projected Minimum Salary per year

131,000.00

Projected Maximum Salary per year

245,000.00

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



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