Senior Software Engineer, Control Plane

Starburst delivers secure, governed access to enterprise data for AI and analytics, and is seeking a Senior Software Engineer to join its globally distributed Control Plane team. The role focuses on designing and building backend services and cloud infrastructure for a unified platform supporting SaaS, self-managed, on-premise, and air-gapped deployments.

Responsibilities:

• Design, develop, and maintain control plane services shared by Starburst Enterprise, Starburst Galaxy, and Trino
• Contribute to the Unified Control Plane: take capabilities that exist in one product (access control, multi-cluster management, routing, catalog management, observability) and deliver them as a single implementation that serves both SaaS and self-managed deployments
• Own the reliability, scalability, and efficiency (performance/$) of the services you build - provisioning and upgrading APIs, cluster lifecycle management, and the operational tooling that runs them
• Build for two very different operating models at once: a service Starburst operates at scale, and software our customers deploy and operate themselves across AWS, Azure, and GCP as well as on-premise
• Provide considerate and timely review of your peers' pull requests and design proposals
• Continuously improve our engineering processes, tests, and systems so the codebase and the team's productivity scale together
• Collaborate with team members and other teams globally, and operate in a fast-paced environment
• Provide exceptional customer support for both internal and external customers
• Periodically assist with the React and TypeScript-based Portal UI that surfaces these features; while knowledge of frontend development is beneficial, it is not a prerequisite

Requirements:

• Prior experience developing distributed systems
• Extensive software development experience with Java
• Cloud infrastructure architecture and orchestration experience across at least one major cloud provider
• Experience building and operating backend services that others depend on — APIs, control loops, lifecycle management
• Hands-on adoption of AI coding tools and agents in day-to-day engineering — shipping real code with them, and sound judgment about where they help and where they don't
• Demonstrated experience with software engineering and design best practices
• Appreciation for creating maintainable, performant, and high-quality software as part of a high-performing, globally distributed team
• Intrinsic motivation for improving your software engineering craftsmanship
• Comfort with significant autonomy and ownership
• Curiosity to see what other engineering teams are doing, and the ability to connect the dots — essential when the goal is one implementation replacing two
• Demonstration of Ownership, Grit, and Bias for Action — core values at Starburst