Compiler Engineer, GPU Acceleration

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

As a Software Developer: Generalist, you will design, develop, test, and deliver offerings using leading-edge and/or proven technologies. You will work in an Agile, collaborative environment to understand stakeholder requirements and contribute to the development of innovative software solutions.

Your primary responsibilities will include:

• Develop Component-Level Solutions: Design, code, and test innovative component-level software solutions, ensuring that the implemented solutions are unit tested and ready to be integrated into their product.

• Contribute to CI/CD Pipeline: Contribute to the automated CI/CD pipeline that takes code through various quality stages, ensuring seamless integration and delivery.

• Debug Customer-Reported Problems: Design, develop, and unit test code fixes for customer-reported problems, collaborating with stakeholders to resolve issues efficiently.

• Deliver Offerings: Deliver high-quality offerings using leading-edge and/or proven technologies, meeting stakeholder requirements and expectations.

• Collaborate with Stakeholders: Work in an Agile, collaborative environment to understand stakeholder requirements, providing input and guidance to ensure successful solution delivery.

In this role, you will help target runtime compilation and dynamic code generation for accelerated execution for GPU-accelerated Watsonx.data. You will work on the layer that transforms logical operations into efficient executable paths for heterogeneous compute environments in Velox.

• Design and implement dynamic code generation for accelerated operators.

• Optimize compilation strategies for runtime efficiency and maintainability.

• Improve execution planning interfaces between engine logic and generated code

• Work with GPU and engine teams to expose more operations to acceleration paths

• Build debuggability and correctness checks into generated-code workflows.

Required technical and professional expertise

• Software Development & Compiler Engineering Expertise: Proven experience designing, developing, testing, and delivering high-quality software solutions using leading-edge and proven technologies, with deep hands-on expertise in compiler frameworks, language runtimes, and code generation (e.g., LLVM, MLIR, or equivalent), supported by strong C++ proficiency and systems-level reasoning.

• Component-Level Design & Code Generation: Strong experience designing, coding, and testing innovative component-level solutions, including compiler passes and optimizations, ensuring correctness, performance, unit testing, and seamless integration within execution engines and runtime systems.

• Runtime Systems & Query Processing Knowledge: Familiarity with execution engines and query-processing internals (e.g., Velox, vectorized execution), enabling effective optimization across runtime-generated and host code for high-performance data processing workloads.

• Advanced Debugging & Problem Resolution: Demonstrated expertise debugging complex issues across compiler-generated and host code, with the ability to design, implement, and unit test robust fixes while collaborating with stakeholders to resolve problems efficiently.

• Agile Development & CI/CD Enablement: Experience working in Agile, collaborative environments and contributing to automated CI/CD pipelines, enabling continuous integration, testing, and reliable delivery of high-quality, performance-optimized software solutions.

Preferred technical and professional experience

• Leading-Edge Technologies & GPU Optimization: Experience designing and delivering high-quality software solutions using modern technologies across back-end, front-end, and DevOps domains, with hands-on expertise in GPU programming and kernel optimization (e.g., CUDA, PTX, operator/kernel fusion) to drive high-performance execution.

• Execution Frameworks & Query Planning: Familiarity with cross-engine plan representations such as Substrait and experience with Presto or similar distributed query engine coordinator internals, enabling effective optimization across query planning and execution layers.

• Performance-Focused Engineering: Strong focus on performance and scalability, applying optimization techniques across the software stack to improve execution efficiency in distributed and GPU-accelerated environments.

IBM is committed to creating a diverse environment and 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, caste, genetics, pregnancy, disability, neurodivergence, age, veteran status, or other characteristics. IBM is also committed to compliance with all fair employment practices regarding citizenship and immigration status.