Job Information
IBM Sales Development Engineer in Austin, Texas
Introduction
This is not a pure development role, and it is not a pure sales role — it is both. We are looking for rare individuals who can walk into a room full of sellers, deeply understand their pain points, and then go build the thing that solves them. You are the kind of person who sees a broken process and can’t help but fix it — and you have the technical chops to actually ship the fix, not just file a ticket about it.
The AI Productivity Engineering team sits inside IBM Technology Sales and exists to dramatically accelerate the Select Territory sales motion through custom-built tooling, automation, and AI-powered workflows. You will be embedded with sellers, discovering high-impact problems and rapidly delivering production-grade solutions that scale across the organization.
Your role and responsibilities
Your Role and Responsibilities include:
Operate shoulder-to-shoulder with Select Territory sellers to identify friction, inefficiency, and missed opportunity in their day-to-day workflows.
Rapidly architect, build, and ship internal tools, dashboards, data pipelines, and AI-powered applications that directly improve seller productivity and revenue outcomes.
Function as an "innovation squad" of one — discover emergent problems, propose solutions, and deliver working software in days, not quarters.
Collaborate closely with the broader development team in Toronto on larger committed projects, contributing full-stack development work while maintaining your embedded perspective with the sales organization.
Serve as a bridge between the technical team and business stakeholders, translating seller needs into actionable engineering requirements and vice versa.
Leverage and extend IBM’s AI and data platforms (watsonx, Cloud Pak for Data, Sterling, and others) to build solutions tailored to the sales organization’s needs.
Participate in daily scrums, contribute to sprint planning, and help manage the prioritization backlog in partnership with the Lead Architect.
What Makes You a Fit
You’ve been a seller, a solutions engineer, a consultant, or a developer — ideally more than one of these — and you’ve built things on the side because you couldn’t help yourself. You are the person who built the dashboard nobody asked for and then the whole team adopted it. You have the initiative to identify a problem, the technical skill to solve it, and the communication ability to get buy-in.
Required technical and professional expertise
Full-stack development capability: proficiency in at least one modern backend language (Python, Node.js, Java) and frontend framework (React, Vue, Angular).
Demonstrated ability to independently identify a business problem and ship a working technical solution — in a professional setting, a side project, or an open-source contribution. We want to see builder instinct.
Experience working in or alongside a sales organization, with a functional understanding of sales processes, CRM systems, and pipeline mechanics.
Comfort with data — you can write SQL, build a data pipeline, or stand up a quick analytical dashboard when the situation calls for it.
Strong communication and storytelling skills: you can demo what you’ve built, explain why it matters, and get non-technical stakeholders excited about it.
Self-directed work style with the ability to operate effectively in ambiguous, fast-moving environments with minimal supervision.
Preferred technical and professional experience
Experience with IBM’s technology portfolio: watsonx, Cloud Pak for Data, Sterling, Turbonomic, or similar enterprise platforms.
Background in AI/ML application development — not research-level, but practical deployment of models, prompts, RAG pipelines, or intelligent automation.
Familiarity with DevOps practices: CI/CD, containerization (Docker/Kubernetes), infrastructure-as-code.
Prior experience in a high-velocity sales environment (technology, SaaS, or enterprise software).
Track record of building internal tools or productivity solutions that achieved organic adoption across a team or organization.
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.