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

Camunda is an enterprise platform for agentic orchestration that coordinates AI agents, people, and systems across complex business processes. The Senior Software Engineer will design, build, and evolve Camunda 8’s event-sourced distributed workflow engine and APIs, while leading complex technical initiatives, improving resiliency and performance, and mentoring engineers.

Responsibilities:

• Design, build, and evolve the event-sourced engine and its C8 REST/gRPC/MCP API (command/event, CQRS), including safe public-API evolution — backward-compatible changes, versioning/deprecation, and contract tests so existing integrations and AI agents never break
• Take on hard, ambiguous problems and lead them end-to-end — define the problem, write the solution design (ADR), weigh trade-offs pragmatically, sequence the work, and drive delivery across the team
• Ship high-impact engine features fast — such as suspending and resuming individual process instances, and enabling AI agents to steer running processes — all while simplifying the engine and holding it to an extremely high quality bar
• Ship resiliency, schema evolution, and observability — smooth version upgrades, replay safety, migration correctness on the event log, and features diagnosable in production, not after the fact
• Detect and optimize inefficient processing and data-access patterns across our data stores (RocksDB, Elasticsearch/OpenSearch, relational/Postgres) — spot shapes that don't scale, and fix them
• Level up the team and lead incidents — high-quality reviews, mentoring, and winning technical debates with reasoning (a role model who cares deeply about product and team, not a lone hero); on call, drive resolution, own the RCA, and feed systemic fixes back into the platform

Requirements:

• Ability and/or willingness to use our product
• 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
• Experience with workflow automation / process orchestration (BPMN or similar)
• 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)