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

About Camunda

Camunda is the enterprise platform for agentic orchestration, enabling organizations to coordinate AI agents, people, and systems across complex, end-to-end business processes. With built-in governance, auditability, and human oversight, Camunda gives enterprises the control they need to move AI from pilots to production — safely and at scale. Trusted by over 700 organizations worldwide, including 9 of top 10 US banks, Camunda helps enterprises boost operational efficiency, accelerate time-to-value, and deliver better customer experiences.

Fully remote and global, we are in the middle of something bigger: transforming into an AI-first organisation, built on our own platform. We use Agentic AI to automate, orchestrate intelligent processes, and elevate human contribution across every team.

About the Role

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.

What You'll Be Doing

• 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; on call, drive resolution, own the RCA, and feed systemic fixes back into the platform.

What You Bring

• 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.
• 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.
• Communication & product sense — crisp technical writing (ADRs), remote-first collaboration, deep product thinking.

Nice-to-Haves

• Experience with workflow automation / process orchestration (BPMN or similar).
• Awareness of consensus/replication protocols (Raft, SWIM, etc.).
• Deep query-pattern optimization in RocksDB, Elasticsearch/OpenSearch, and relational/Postgres.
• Solid JVM knowledge (memory model, concurrency/performance).

What We Offer

• Remote & Flexible: Work from anywhere with a home office budget, co-working space support, and flexible time off.
• In-Person Connection: Annual Kickoffs, team offsites, and meetup budgets.
• Health & Wellbeing: Local healthcare, Modern Health mental wellbeing support, and the Live Well LSA.
• Financial Security: Retirement and pension plans, plus life and disability insurance.
• Professional Growth: Up to $/€/£1,000 per year for self-driven learning and development.