Senior Software Engineer, Backend

About the role

Join Camunda's Core / API & Process Automation team to shape the future of Camunda 8, a distributed workflow engine powering critical business processes globally. This role offers the chance to make significant technical contributions that impact every product and integration built on our platform. You'll tackle complex challenges in performance, data integrity, and API evolution for a system that demands absolute reliability.

Key facts

What you'll do

• Design, build, and refine the event-sourced engine and its C8 REST/gRPC/MCP API, ensuring safe public-API evolution with backward compatibility and robust contract tests.
• Lead the full lifecycle of challenging, undefined problems, from initial definition and solution design to pragmatic trade-off analysis and driving delivery.
• Deliver high-impact engine features rapidly, such as suspending/resuming process instances and enabling AI agent steering, while maintaining high quality and simplifying the engine.
• Implement resiliency, schema evolution, and observability features, including smooth upgrades, replay safety, migration correctness, and production diagnosability.
• Identify and resolve inefficient processing and data-access patterns across data stores like RocksDB, Elasticsearch/OpenSearch, and relational/Postgres.
• Elevate the team through high-quality reviews, mentorship, and leading technical discussions, and take ownership of production incidents, driving resolution and systemic improvements.

Requirements

• Ability or willingness to utilize the Camunda product.
• 5+ years of professional backend engineering experience, with deep knowledge of distributed and event-driven systems.
• Extensive understanding of event sourcing and distributed execution, including consistency, ordering, replay, and handling failure modes.
• Strong expertise in API design and evolution, focusing on contract-first development, backward compatibility, versioning, and contract testing.
• Proven ability to diagnose and resolve performance issues under production load, including profiling, benchmarking, and reasoning about tail-latency and backpressure.
• Demonstrated technical leadership in ambiguous situations, working autonomously, breaking down complex problems, making pragmatic decisions, and fostering team growth.
• Excellent communication and product sense, including clear technical writing for asynchronous decision-making, remote collaboration skills, and strong product thinking.

Nice to have

• Familiarity with workflow automation or process orchestration (e.g., BPMN).
• Awareness of consensus/replication protocols like Raft or SWIM, sufficient for designing engine behavior on top of them.
• Deep expertise in query-pattern optimization for RocksDB, Elasticsearch/OpenSearch, and relational/Postgres.
• Solid understanding of the JVM, including memory model, concurrency, and performance.

Skills & tools

• Distributed Systems
• Event-Driven Architecture
• Event Sourcing
• API Design (REST, gRPC)
• CQRS
• RocksDB
• Elasticsearch/OpenSearch
• Postgres
• JVM

Practical notes

• This is a fully remote and global role.
• Compensation includes a base salary and potential variable target, with ranges adjusted for location (Standard and Major markets). Final offers consider skills, experience, and location, typically within the first half of the range.
• Benefits include a home office budget, co-working space support, flexible time off, annual company kickoffs (Vienna 2025, Madrid 2026), team offsites, and Camundi Connection Budgets.
• Health and wellbeing benefits include locally tailored healthcare, Modern Health for mental wellbeing, and a Live Well Lifestyle Spending Account (LSA) launching in 2026 (scaling to €1,000 annually from 2027).
• Financial security includes retirement/pension plans and insurance where applicable.
• Professional growth is supported with up to $/€/£1,000 annually for self-driven learning.
• Camunda may use AI tools in the hiring process.
• Camunda is an equal opportunity employer and values diverse cultures and backgrounds.
• Be aware of potential scams; Camunda will only contact candidates from @camunda.com email addresses and will never ask for financial details during hiring.