Senior Software Engineer Consul

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

About the Role: We are seeking a highly skilled and experienced Senior Software Engineer to join our Consul team. You will be designing, building, and maintaining the core of HashiCorp Consul, the open-source and enterprise tool that powers the service mesh and service discovery for thousands of companies worldwide.

This is a high-leverage individual contributor (IC) role where you will have a significant impact on the future architecture of Consul. You will be solving some of the most challenging problems in distributed systems, networking, and cloud-native infrastructure.

Responsibilities

• Technical Leadership: Lead the design and delivery of large-scale features, driving architecture, implementation, and long-term maintainability.
• End-to-End Ownership: Own critical components of Consul across the full lifecycle—from RFC and design through implementation, testing, deployment, and ongoing maintenance. Build alignment across stakeholders and drive initiatives to completion.
• Engineering Excellence: Raise the bar for code quality and system design through in-depth code reviews, architectural guidance, and mentorship.
• Production Ownership: Act as a technical lead during on-call rotations, driving resolution of complex production incidents. Diagnose and address performance bottlenecks, reliability issues, and security concerns across the stack.
• Innovation & Strategy: Evaluate and adopt emerging technologies in the cloud-native ecosystem (e.g., eBPF, zero-trust security, next-gen proxy architectures).
• Mentorship: Mentor and develop junior engineers through pairing, design discussions, and detailed feedback.
• Cross-functional Collaboration: Partner closely with Product, Solutions, Support, and the open-source community to shape and deliver on the product roadmap.
• Open Source Contribution: Contribute to both community and enterprise offerings, balancing the needs of a diverse user base.
• Release & Quality Ownership: Lead release processes, improving automation and reliability. Drive performance benchmarking and scalability testing initiatives.
  
  

• 6+ years of professional software engineering experience, with a heavy focus on building and operating production-grade distributed systems.
• Expert-level proficiency in Go (Golang), including strong knowledge of concurrency, memory management, and performance optimization. Ability to design clean, scalable APIs and work with complex system state.
• Proven track record of building and operating highly available, fault-tolerant, and scalable cloud-native services.
• Strong, fundamental understanding of network protocols (TCP/IP, HTTP, gRPC), operating systems, and cloud infrastructure (AWS, GCP, Azure, OpenShift).
• Solid understanding of distributed system concepts, including CAP theorem, consistency models, and consensus algorithms (e.g., Raft, Paxos), with practical implementation experience.
• Deep experience with containerization and orchestration technologies (Docker, Kubernetes).
• Excellent problem-solving and debugging skills, with the ability to independently navigate complex, ambiguous challenges.
• Strong communication skills, with the ability to clearly articulate technical concepts to diverse audiences.
• Experience with automation and testing strategies, including load, performance, and scalability testing.
• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science (or related field), or equivalent practical experience.
  
  

• Experience with infrastructure as code tools (e.g., Terraform). Writes reusable modules and understands state management at scale.
• Preferred expertise in Vault/Nomad and Envoy/Consul (service mesh/networking)
• Experience with CI/CD pipelines (e.g., GitHub Actions)
• Prior experience contributing to or maintaining open-source projects.
• Experience with service mesh technologies (Consul, Istio, Linkerd) or proxies (Envoy, HAProxy).
• Familiarity with various data stores (e.g., SQL, NoSQL, KV stores).