Software Engineer - Quality and Performance

Introduction

We're building Astra Serverless, the next generation of distributed, scalable, fault-tolerant, serverless NoSQL data services - powered by Apache Cassandra and extended with native Vector and AI capabilities across multi-cloud environments.

Our customers depend on our platform to serve real-time, mission-critical workloads on a global scale. Ensuring reliability, performance, and correctness under unpredictable workloads is a non-trivial challenge - and that's where you come in.

As an engineer on the Quality Engineering and Performance team, you'll develop and evolve the system-level testing frameworks that validate a distributed database-as-a-service at massive AI-driven workload scale. You'll help ensure that new features, performance improvements, and AI-driven extensions meet the highest standards of scalability and resilience.

Why this role?

You'll work at the intersection of distributed systems engineering and test architecture - hands on designing and building automation and frameworks that simulate complex multi-cloud deployments, chaos scenarios, and performance stress conditions.

This is not QA-as-usual: you'll engineer the test systems that validate an elastic database platform capable of scaling thousands of non-uniform nodes, self-healing under failure, and integrating real-time vector search and analytics.

If you thrive on deep technical challenges, curiosity, analytical and systems thinking, and building tools other engineers rely on, this role will feel like home.

Your role and responsibilities

• Design and develop frameworks for end-to-end and chaos testing of distributed, serverless Cassandra-based systems.
• Engineer automation that validates data correctness, fault tolerance, and performance under complex multi-region and -cloud topologies.
• Collaborate closely with your peers in local and remote feature development teams to model real-world scenarios and integrate automated validation into the delivery pipeline.
• Continuously evolve the test infrastructure for scale, speed, and observability - leveraging Kubernetes, Docker, and cloud-native toolchains.
• Profile and tune distributed workloads to uncover systemic bottlenecks and verify that service-level goals are consistently met.
• Contribute code to shared testing frameworks and participate in design and code reviews across teams.
• Own the full cycle of quality engineering - from test design and execution to insights and continuous improvement.

Required education

None

Preferred education

Bachelor's Degree

Required technical and professional expertise

• Exposure to system level Java and Python development in testing for distributed or cloud systems - replication, partitioning, consistency, and eventual convergence.

• Eagerness to learn more about and using chaos testing, fault injection, or resilience validation.
• Knowledge of analyzing complex logs and metrics to isolate performance and reliability issues.
• Familiarity with Linux, Kubernetes, Docker, and CI/CD pipelines (Jenkins, GitHub Actions, etc.).

Preferred technical and professional experience

• Familiarity with NoSQL technologies (Cassandra, DynamoDB, ScyllaDB, etc.) and cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, Azure) and multi-cloud topologies.

• Curiosity-driven mindset, strong communication skills, and a focus on collaboration and craftsmanship.
• Understanding of vector search, AI embeddings, or data-intensive workloads.

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

For additional information about location requirements, please discuss with the recruiter following submission of your application.

Client-provided location(s): Krakow, Poland

Job ID: IBM-66296

Employment Type: OTHER

Posted: 2025-10-18T18:47:33