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

Camunda is the enterprise platform for agentic orchestration, enabling organizations to coordinate AI agents, people, and systems across complex, end-to-end business processes. As a Senior Software Engineer on Camunda's Core / API & Process Automation team, you'll work on the event-sourced, distributed workflow engine that executes business-critical processes for thousands of customers, ensuring high performance and reliability.

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)