Senior Software Engineer,Backend - Core/API & Process Automation

Role Description

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 and, through them, millions of people worldwide. Because you sit at the core, one well-made improvement propagates outward through every integration and product built on top of it: a small change here is felt everywhere.

Few systems demand this. You'll squeeze the last drops of performance out of the hot paths. You'll design maintainability and versioning strategies for an engine that must faithfully replay every event it has ever written — forever. You'll reason about the concurrency between the engine advancing a process and a user mutating that same process in the same instant. And you'll hold an unforgiving bar: data must never be corrupted, and a process must never get stuck — because when it does, customers lose money. That single constraint cascades into some of the hardest technical and product challenges you'll find anywhere.

You'll also help define what comes next. Enabling AI agents to integrate with and drive the engine is cutting-edge work, and the features we ship create real aha moments and stretch what the industry thinks automation can do. You'll do it alongside a world-spanning team of highly skilled, highly motivated engineers who share one goal: make Camunda the best workflow engine in the world. As a senior here you set the technical bar — you take ambiguous problems and give them shape, lead the hard discussions, and make the people around you better.

Curious about the kind of challenges you'll work on at Camunda? Watch this quick 30-minute talk from our engineers to learn more about the new Camunda Exporter and how we’re solving complex problems at scale.

Qualifications

• 5+ years professional backend engineering, with real depth in distributed and event-driven systems.
• Deep event sourcing / distributed execution knowledge — consistency, ordering, replay, and their failure modes (partitions, crashes, duplicate/reordered delivery, idempotency, recovery).
• Strong API design and evolution — contract-first, backward-compatible change, versioning/deprecation, contract testing.
• Diagnosing/fixing performance under production load — profiling, benchmarking, tail-latency and backpressure reasoning.
• Technical leadership from ambiguity — work autonomously, break down undefined problems, drive pragmatic decisions, disagree-and-commit, and level other engineers up (not a lone hero).
• Communication & product sense — crisp technical writing (ADRs that decide things async), remote-first collaboration, deep product thinking, and an outstanding manager of one.

Requirements

• Ability and/or willingness to use our product.
• Experience with workflow automation / process orchestration (BPMN or similar) is a nice-to-have.
• Awareness of the consensus/replication protocols the engine builds on (Raft, SWIM, etc.) — enough to design the engine to behave correctly on top of them (this layer itself is owned by another team).
• Deep query-pattern optimization in RocksDB, Elasticsearch/OpenSearch and relational/Postgres.
• Solid JVM knowledge (memory model, concurrency/perf).

Benefits

• Competitive, fair, and transparent compensation.
• Equity through our Virtual Stock Option Plan (VSOP).
• Remote & Flexible: Work from anywhere with home office budget, co-working space support, and flexible time off.
• In Person Connection: Annual Kickoff, team offsites, and Camundi Connection Budgets.
• Health & Wellbeing: Access to locally tailored healthcare, Modern Health for global mental wellbeing, and Live Well Lifestyle Spending Account (LSA).
• Financial Security: Retirement and pension plans, plus life and disability insurance where relevant.
• Professional Growth: Up to $/€/£1,000 per year for self-driven learning.