About the role
Backend engineering rarely gets this consequential. As a Senior Software Engineer on Camunda's Core / API & Process Automation team, you'll work on the beating heart of Camunda 8 — the event-sourced, distributed workflow engine that executes business-critical processes for thousands of customers. You will design maintainability and versioning strategies, manage concurrency, and ensure system integrity at a massive scale.
What You’ll Be Doing
- Design, build, and evolve the event-sourced engine and its C8 REST/gRPC/MCP API, including safe public-API evolution.
- Take on hard, ambiguous problems and lead them end-to-end, including solution design (ADR) and driving delivery.
- Ship high-impact engine features fast, such as suspending and resuming individual process instances and enabling AI agents to steer running processes.
- Implement resiliency, schema evolution, and observability features like migration correctness on the event log.
- Detect and optimize inefficient processing and data-access patterns across data stores including RocksDB, Elasticsearch/OpenSearch, and PostgreSQL.
- Level up the team through high-quality code reviews, mentoring, and leading incident resolutions.
What You Bring
- 5+ years of professional backend engineering experience with depth in distributed and event-driven systems.
- Deep knowledge of event sourcing, distributed execution, and handling failure modes such as partitions, crashes, and idempotency.
- Strong experience with API design, contract testing, and backward-compatible versioning.
- Proven ability to diagnose and fix performance issues under production load, including profiling and benchmarking.
- Technical leadership skills with a track record of driving autonomous work and pragmatic decision-making.
- Excellent technical writing and communication skills for remote-first collaboration.
Nice-to-haves
- Experience with workflow automation or process orchestration (BPMN).
- Awareness of consensus and replication protocols like Raft or SWIM.
- Deep query-pattern optimization skills for RocksDB, Elasticsearch/OpenSearch, and relational databases.
- Solid JVM knowledge regarding memory models and concurrency.