About the role:
Backend engineering rarely gets this consequential. As a 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. Because you sit at the core, one well-made improvement propagates outward through every integration and product built on top of it.
You'll dig into the performance of hot paths, versioning strategies for an engine that must faithfully replay every event, and the concurrency between the engine and user mutations. This is genuine distributed-systems work — event sourcing, ordering, concurrency, and replay. You'll also help build what comes next — including enabling AI agents to drive the engine, cutting-edge work that stretches what the industry thinks automation can do.
What You’ll Be Doing:
- Build and evolve features in the event-sourced engine and its C8 REST/gRPC/MCP API (command/event, CQRS).
- Own well-scoped work end-to-end — implement, test, and ship; contribute your ideas to solution designs and write clear design notes / ADRs.
- Help ship high-impact engine features — like suspending and resuming individual process instances, enabling AI agents to steer running processes, and variable tracing.
- Design and consume clean APIs — good contracts, developer ergonomics, and an awareness of not breaking existing integrations.
- Detect and optimize inefficient processing and data-access patterns across our data stores (RocksDB, Elasticsearch/OpenSearch, relational/Postgres) and build observability into what you ship.
- Proactively flag issues and tech debt, keep quality high through reviews and testing, and participate in support / on-call.
Must Haves:
- 2+ years professional backend engineering experience.
- Solid grasp of event-driven systems and genuine eagerness to go deep on event sourcing / distributed systems — including a working understanding of consistency, ordering, and failure basics.
- Good API design instincts (REST) — clean, sensible contracts, with awareness of backward compatibility.
- Strong self-direction to own work and drive it forward in a remote/async setting.
- High growth drive and ambition to take on unfamiliar, uncomfortable challenges.
- Clear written communication skills.
Nice-to-haves:
- Experience with workflow automation / process orchestration (BPMN or similar).
- Comfort reasoning about query patterns in Elasticsearch/OpenSearch and relational/Postgres.
- Familiarity with observability (logging, metrics, tracing).
- Working JVM knowledge.