Software Development Architect

IBM

IBM

Software Engineering, IT

Heredia Province, Heredia, Costa Rica

Posted on Apr 29, 2026
Introduction

A career in IBM Consulting is built on long-term client relationships and close collaboration worldwide. You’ll work with leading companies across industries, helping them shape their data and AI journeys. With support from our strategic partners, robust IBM technology, and Snowflake you’ll have the tools to drive meaningful change and accelerate client impact. At IBM Consulting, curiosity fuels success. You’ll be encouraged to challenge the norm, explore new ideas, and create innovative solutions that deliver real results. Our culture of growth and empathy focuses on your long-term career development while valuing your unique skills and experiences.

In this role, you'll work in one of our IBM Consulting Client Innovation Centers (Delivery Centers), where we deliver deep technical and industry expertise to a wide range of public and private sector clients around the world. Our delivery centers offer our clients locally based skills and technical expertise to drive innovation and adoption of new technology.

Your role and responsibilities

As a Software Development Architect, you will own the end-to-end technical design of data-intensive applications delivered to our Fortune 1000 clients. You will sit at the intersection of application engineering and the modern data stack, partnering directly with client stakeholders — from product owners to CIOs — to translate business problems into architectures that are performant, cost-aware, and operable at enterprise scale.

You will be accountable for the technical success of your engagements and the growth of the engineers around you.

• Lead solution architecture and requirements-gathering sessions with client technical and business stakeholders, including pre-sales discovery and scoping conversations.

• Define target-state architectures for data-intensive applications spanning ingestion, transformation, storage, APIs, and user-facing surfaces; produce architecture decision records (ADRs) and reference diagrams that teams can actually build from.

• Make and defend technical decisions under ambiguity, weighing trade-offs across cost, performance, scalability, security, time-to-market, and maintainability. Document the reasoning so it survives you.

• Technically lead cross-functional teams of 4–10 engineers across concurrent client engagements: set standards, review designs and code, unblock teams, and enforce non-functional requirements (observability, testability, security, data quality).

• Assess scalability risks at 10M / 100M / 1B+ row or event tiers, surface second-order consequences (cost amplification, clustering decay, workflow contention, silent failure modes), and propose mitigations before they become production incidents.

• Partner with data engineers, DevOps, and security counterparts on shared platform concerns: CI/CD, IaC, identity federation, secrets management, and compliance posture.

• Mentor mid and senior engineers; raise the architecture bar across the application development practice and contribute to internal accelerators, standards, and reusable assets.

• Represent IBM’s technical point of view credibly in front of client architecture review boards and executive audiences.

Required education
Bachelor's Degree
Preferred education
Master's Degree
Required technical and professional expertise

Architecture & Solution Design: Deep fluency in software architecture fundamentals, including distributed systems, API design (REST, GraphQL, event-driven), domain-driven design, bounded contexts, CAP trade-offs, idempotency, and failure modes in enterprise-scale production environments.

Cloud, Platform & Engineering Practices: Experience designing and delivering applications on at least one major cloud provider (AWS, Azure, or GCP), covering networking, identity, compute, storage, and managed service selection, along with CI/CD, Git-based workflows, containerization (Docker), and infrastructure as code tools (Terraform, CDK, or Pulumi).

Data & Analytics Platforms: Hands-on experience with data-intensive workloads, including ingestion patterns (batch, streaming, CDC), transformation frameworks (dbt or equivalent), orchestration (Airflow, Prefect, Dagster, or similar), and data modeling (dimensional, normalized, or data vault), as well as working knowledge of cloud data warehouses or lakehouses (Snowflake, BigQuery, Databricks, or Redshift), including query performance, cost levers, access controls, and application integration patterns.

Languages, Databases & Technical Judgment: Strong command of relational and non-relational databases with clear judgment on when to apply each, and proficiency in at least one modern application language and runtime (JavaScript/TypeScript, Python, Java, or .NET) to write representative code and credibly review a team’s output.

Technical Leadership, Delivery & Communication: Ability to lead in Agile environments (Scrum, Kanban, or SAFe), run requirements and solutioning workshops directly with clients, translate ambiguous business needs into bounded and prioritized technical scope, make and defend technical decisions under uncertainty, and communicate effectively; conversational English for direct interaction with technical and business stakeholders.

Preferred technical and professional experience

• Professional-level cloud certification in AWS (Solutions Architect Associate/Professional), Azure (Solutions Architect Expert), or GCP (Professional Cloud Architect).

• Snowflake experience or SnowPro certifications (Core, Advanced Architect, or Advanced Data Engineer).

• Additional professional-level cloud certifications across AWS, Azure, or GCP.

• Experience delivering in a consulting or professional services model, including SOW scoping, estimation, and managing to fixed-fee or milestone-based engagements.

• Background in one or more regulated verticals relevant to our pipeline: financial services, healthcare/life sciences, retail, or CPG.

• Experience integrating LLMs or AI capabilities into production applications — RAG architectures, agent frameworks, evaluation, and cost/latency trade-offs.

• Familiarity with reverse ETL patterns (Hightouch, Census) and operational analytics architectures.

• Experience with event-driven and streaming architectures (Kafka, Kinesis, Event Hubs, Pub/Sub) at non-trivial throughput.

• Prior experience establishing or contributing to an architecture review board, or internal architecture guild.

ABOUT BUSINESS UNIT

IBM Consulting is IBM’s consulting and global professional services business, with market leading capabilities in business and technology transformation. With deep expertise in many industries, we offer strategy, experience, technology, and operations services to many of the most innovative and valuable companies in the world. Our people are focused on accelerating our clients’ businesses through the power of collaboration. We believe in the power of technology responsibly used to help people, partners and the planet.

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.

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