Senior Software Engineer, Backend - Distributed Systems

Camunda is an enterprise platform for agentic orchestration that coordinates AI agents, people, and systems across complex business processes. The Senior Software Engineer, Backend will build and evolve the durable, highly available, horizontally scalable distributed streaming platform underlying Camunda 8, while leading engineering initiatives and collaborating across product, DevOps, Support, and SRE.

Responsibilities:

• Design, build, and maintain backend services for the distributed streaming platform that powers the foundation for Camunda 8’s orchestration capabilities, ensuring durability, high availability, and horizontal scalability
• Lead medium‑to‑large engineering initiatives (3+ months) end‑to‑end: partner with Product to translate business problems into technical requirements, write solution designs, draft and maintain project plans, and drive timely, high‑quality delivery
• Help mature our disaster recovery and resilience story, including implementing and evolving an online backup/restore API and contributing to improved multi‑region and multi‑tenant capabilities for our cloud offering
• Design and implement developer and operator tooling that makes it easier to understand, troubleshoot, and safely operate a complex distributed system in production environments
• Improve engineering effectiveness by collaborating with DevOps and other Core Application teams on CI, testing, and local development workflows to reduce PR time‑to‑merge and the overhead of working on multiple features in parallel
• Participate in L3 support and on‑call rotations, partnering closely with Support and SRE to investigate and resolve complex, performance‑sensitive production issues, and feeding what you learn back into our product and platform

Requirements:

• 7+ years of professional experience as a software engineer, with a strong focus on backend systems and/or distributed systems
• Proven experience leading medium‑to‑large engineering initiatives (roughly 3+ months), breaking down ambiguous problems, writing clear solution designs and project plans, coordinating with multiple teams, and driving predictable delivery
• Hands‑on experience building and maintaining highly concurrent, data‑intensive software, with a deep understanding of low‑level network and disk I/O (for example, throughput, latency, backpressure, batching, and failure modes)
• Demonstrated ability to work autonomously and navigate ambiguity – you are comfortable taking on problems you haven't solved before, breaking them down into concrete steps, and driving them to completion with minimal supervision
• Strong communication and collaboration skills in a remote‑first environment: you tailor explanations to your audience, translate business requirements into actionable technical work with Product, and help teams reach clear, decisive outcomes with minimal churn
• Experience building workflow automation or process orchestration software
• Experience with distributed systems algorithms or protocols such as Raft, Paxos, SWIM, and/or CRDTs
• Strong familiarity with the observability pillars (logging, metrics, tracing) and how to integrate observability into the development and incident lifecycle, ideally including experience with L3 support and on‑call
• Deep knowledge of the Java Virtual Machine, especially its memory model and performance characteristics in highly concurrent, data‑intensive workloads