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

Platform Design & Engineering
• Design, build, and maintain a scalable AI Platform that supports multiple engineering teams in delivering natural language conversation, RAG-based retrieval, and AI-driven data solutions.

• Develop core platform services including LLM routing, model abstraction layers, prompt management, and inference orchestration across cloud and on-premise infrastructure.

• Architect and implement RAG pipelines — including vector store integration, document ingestion, chunking strategies, and retrieval optimization — enabling teams to ground AI responses in enterprise data.

• Build secure, governed data access patterns that allow AI agents and models to query complex structured and unstructured data sources safely and efficiently.

AI Agent & Agentic Framework Development
• Engineer agentic capabilities including multi-step reasoning, tool use, and agent-to-agent (A2A) coordination patterns that empower downstream teams to deliver autonomous AI workflows.

• Implement and maintain MCP (Model Context Protocol) server registrations, enabling standardized tool discovery and invocation across the platform ecosystem.

• Contribute to the design of circuit breaking, retry logic, and guardrail mechanisms that ensure safe and reliable agentic behavior in production environments.

Platform Enablement & Developer Experience
• Partner with engineering teams across the organization to understand their AI delivery needs and translate them into platform capabilities, SDKs, and reusable components.

• Develop and maintain self-service tooling, APIs, and documentation that enable product engineers to integrate AI capabilities without deep platform expertise.

• Establish and enforce platform engineering standards around security, observability, cost management, and AI governance to ensure responsible AI delivery at scale.

Data & AI Intelligence
• Build and maintain AI-driven pipelines that process complex customer data to identify, surface, and deliver actionable business value through intelligent automation and insight generation.

• Collaborate with data scientists to productionize models and analytical workflows, ensuring seamless integration with platform data infrastructure including data lakes, warehouses, and streaming systems.

• Instrument platform telemetry and evaluation frameworks to measure AI system quality, latency, cost, and business impact across consuming teams.

Technical Leadership & Collaboration
• Serve as a technical leader and trusted partner across principal engineers, staff engineers, and data science disciplines — driving alignment on platform architecture and engineering standards.

• Participate in design reviews, threat modeling, and architectural decision-making, advocating for scalable, maintainable, and secure platform patterns.

• Mentor mid-level engineers through code reviews, pairing sessions, and technical guidance, raising the engineering bar across the broader platform team.

Required education

Bachelor's Degree

Preferred education

Master's Degree

Required technical and professional expertise

• 5+ years of professional software development experience, with demonstrated depth in backend platform or infrastructure engineering with proven experience designing and building distributed systems or platform-level services that serve multiple internal engineering teams.
• Hands-on experience with large language model (LLM) integration, including prompt engineering, model API consumption, and managing inference pipelines in production.
• Strong proficiency in Python and/or Java/Go, with demonstrated ability to engineer production-quality, maintainable, and well-tested code with a solid understanding of RESTful API design, event-driven architecture, and asynchronous processing patterns as they apply to AI platform services.
• Experience with major cloud platforms (AWS preferred) and the services relevant to AI/ML workloads — including managed compute, storage, and model serving infrastructure.
• Experience working with AI orchestration frameworks such as LangChain, LangGraph, LlamaIndex, or equivalent agentic tooling.

Preferred technical and professional experience

• Experience with MCP (Model Context Protocol) or A2A (Agent-to-Agent) protocol design and implementation within multi-agent AI systems.
• Hands-on experience with AWS Bedrock, Azure AI Foundry, or watsonx as a managed AI platform for model hosting, fine-tuning, or inference routing.
• Familiarity with LiteLLM, OpenRouter, or similar LLM proxy/routing layers for abstracting multi-model inference across providers.
• Experience with Snowflake, including Snowpark, Cortex AI features, or Time Travel, as part of a data platform or AI analytics workflow.
• Background in IBM enterprise platforms including Apptio, Cloudability, or IBM ContextForge, with awareness of how AI augments financial and cloud cost management use cases.
• Knowledge of AI governance, responsible AI practices, and security controls for AI systems — including data privacy, access control, and output guardrails.
• Experience with observability tooling applied to AI systems — including LLM evaluation frameworks, token cost tracking, latency profiling, and quality metrics pipelines.
• Exposure to AI compliance requirements (e.g., FIPS, SOC 2, FedRAMP) and how they shape platform architecture decisions in regulated enterprise environments.
• Contributions to open-source AI tooling, published technical writing, or demonstrated thought leadership in the generative AI or ML platform space.
• Experience building internal developer platforms (IDPs) or platform-as-product models where the primary customer is an internal engineering audience.

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 Software Development Engineer - AI / Data Science

Date posted

19-May-2026

Job ID

114622

City / Township / Village

LOWELL, DURHAM, Raleigh, Boston, Bellevue, San Jose, Austin, Seattle

State / Province

Texas, North Carolina, Washington, 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

Some travel may be required based on business demand

Company

(0147) International Business Machines Corporation

Shift

General (daytime)

Is this role a commissionable/sales incentive based position?

No



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