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Introduction

A career in IBM Software means you'll be part of a team that transforms our customer's challenges into industry-leading solutions. We are an infinitely curious team, always seeking new possibilities, and dedicated to creating the world's leading AI-powered, cloud-native software solutions. Our renowned legacy creates endless global opportunities for our network of IBMers. We are a team of deep product experts, ensuring exceptional client experiences, with a focus on delivery, excellence, and obsession over customer outcomes. This position involves contributing to HashiCorp's offerings, now part of IBM, which empower organizations to automate and secure multi-cloud and hybrid environments. You will join a team managing the lifecycle of infrastructure and security, enhancing IBM's cloud solutions to ensure enterprises achieve efficiency, security, and scalability in their cloud journey.

Your role and responsibilities

 

The Core Data organization, within the Automation business unit of IBM, is composed of Software Engineers, Product Managers, and Designers who build and operate the foundational services necessary for the reliable lifecycle of data and the secure orchestration of autonomous agents across hybrid and multi-cloud environments. We are building an intelligent, governed, agent-driven control plane—a unified solution that combines the strengths of HashiCorp's products with the IBM suite to securely connect and govern autonomous software agents across the enterprise IT landscape. 

 

 

 

We are looking for a highly experienced Principal Engineer to define and drive our long-term technical success across the organization. This role requires strategic technical leadership to architect and influence complex, long-term initiatives, while simultaneously setting unified technical standards and engineering excellence that raise the bar for all teams. A core component of this role is acting as a force multiplier, building a sustainable peer technical network through mentorship and delegation. This Principal Engineer will be instrumental in bridging the technologies of HashiCorp and IBM to deliver a unified, compelling solution that addresses the needs of our enterprise clients. The ideal candidate will demonstrate exceptional flexibility to step into various high-leverage roles to deliver the highest impact where the organization needs it most, will be excited by the prospect of building new, innovative solutions from the ground up alongside a team of highly passionate and talented engineers. 

 

  • Drive Engineering and Operational Excellence: Set the standard for engineering excellence, driving best practices, architecture review processes, and operational maturity across the organization. 

  • Strategic Technical Influence: Apply deep knowledge of the business and advanced software engineering expertise to guide and influence the most challenging projects that are transformational, complex, high-risk, or technically demanding. 

  • Thought Leadership and Innovation: Anticipate, identify, and execute on innovative and visionary concepts for IBM/HashiCorp products and practices that drive the product roadmap, solve complex industry issues, and aim for game-changing market leadership. 

  • Architectural Stewardship: Shape the organization's technical direction on key technologies, architectural patterns, and client solutions, particularly in areas like reliable data lifecycle, secure orchestration, and the intelligent control plane. 

  • Technical Force Multiplier: Act as a critical force multiplier by actively mentoring senior engineers, delegating high-leverage work, and building a sustainable, strong peer technical network to scale organizational impact. 

 
Required education
High School Diploma/GED
Preferred education
Bachelor's Degree
Required technical and professional expertise

  • 15+ years of progressive experience in software engineering, including a minimum of 3 years operating in a Principal Engineer, Distinguished Engineer, or Senior Staff Engineer capacity with demonstrated influence spanning multiple teams, product lines, or organizations. 

  • Deep Technical Leadership: Proven ability to serve as the Technical Lead for challenging, business-critical, and highly complex projects, leading winning cross-functional teams to deliver strategic technical solutions with clarity and conviction. 

  • Programming Expertise: Professional experience developing with modern programming languages and frameworks, and are interested in working in Golang. Experience in distributed systems, high-scale services, and/or data infrastructure is highly valued. 

  • Strategic Vision: Demonstrated experience crafting and successfully driving a multi-year technical strategy and vision that aligns with product goals and anticipates future industry needs. 

 
Preferred technical and professional experience

  • Are a technical leader capable of crafting long-term strategy and vision. 

  • Possess strong written communication skills and thrive in an all-remote, document-based culture, leveraging both asynchronous and synchronous collaboration to effectively partner with, unblock, and guide your peers. 

  • Are an effective communicator, collaborator, and influencer with engineering, product and design teams. 

  • Are able to identify pragmatic and ideal solutions blending customer feedback with technical foresight. 

  • Have experience using HashiCorp products. 

  • Navigate ambiguity while remaining empathetic and kind. 

  • Eagerly take on new challenges and are driven to deliver the highest quality solution. 

  • Desire for continuous self-improvement and a passion for mentoring others. 

  • You’ve reviewed our principles and they resonate with your professional values. 

 

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 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.