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

Company Overview: Camunda

Camunda is a leading enterprise platform for agentic orchestration, facilitating the coordination of AI agents, people, and systems across intricate, end-to-end business processes. With integrated governance, auditability, and human oversight, Camunda empowers enterprises to safely and scalably transition AI initiatives from pilot to production. Trusted globally by over 700 organizations, including 9 of the top 10 US banks, Camunda helps businesses enhance operational efficiency, accelerate time-to-value, and deliver superior customer experiences. As a fully remote and global company, Camunda is undergoing a significant transformation to become an AI-first organization, leveraging its own platform to automate, orchestrate intelligent processes, and elevate human contributions across all teams. Recognized on GP Bullhound’s Top 100 Next Unicorn list for 2025, certified as a Great Place to Work in 2025, and a Visionary in the 2025 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Business Orchestration and Automation Technologies, Camunda also ranks 3rd in Flexa's 2026 Most Flexible Companies. The company is experiencing rapid growth and seeks top talent for meaningful, high-impact work.

About The Role: Senior Software Engineer, Backend - Core/API & Process Automation

This is a highly consequential backend engineering role. As a Senior Software Engineer on Camunda's Core/API & Process Automation team, you will be instrumental in developing and enhancing Camunda 8, the event-sourced, distributed workflow engine that powers business-critical processes for thousands of customers and millions of global users. Your contributions will have far-reaching impact, as improvements made at the core propagate through every integration and product built on top of the engine. This position demands meticulous attention to performance optimization, especially in hot paths, and designing robust maintainability and versioning strategies for an engine that must faithfully replay all past events indefinitely. You will navigate complex concurrency challenges between engine process advancements and simultaneous user mutations, upholding an uncompromising standard: data integrity and process continuity are paramount, as failures directly impact customer operations and revenue. These constraints drive some of the most challenging technical and product problems in the industry.

You will also play a key role in defining future innovations, particularly enabling AI agents to seamlessly integrate with and drive the engine. This cutting-edge work creates significant "aha" moments, pushing the boundaries of what automation can achieve. You will collaborate with a diverse, highly skilled, and motivated global team, all united by the goal of making Camunda the world's best workflow engine. As a senior engineer, you will set the technical benchmark, transforming ambiguous problems into actionable solutions, leading critical discussions, and fostering the growth of your peers. For insights into the technical challenges at Camunda, consider watching a 30-minute talk from their engineers about the new Camunda Exporter and large-scale problem solving.

Key Responsibilities: What You’ll Be Doing

• Design and Evolve Core Engine: Design, build, and continuously evolve the event-sourced engine and its C8 REST/gRPC/MCP API, focusing on command/event and CQRS patterns. Ensure safe public API evolution through backward-compatible changes, versioning/deprecation, and comprehensive contract tests to prevent disruption to existing integrations and AI agents.
• Lead End-to-End Problem Solving: Tackle complex, ambiguous problems by defining the challenge, crafting solution designs (ADRs), pragmatically evaluating trade-offs, sequencing work effectively, and driving delivery across the team.
• Ship High-Impact Engine Features: Rapidly deliver critical engine features, such as suspending and resuming individual process instances and enabling AI agents to steer running processes. Maintain an exceptionally high quality bar while simplifying the engine architecture.
• Enhance Resiliency and Observability: Implement features for smooth version upgrades, ensure replay safety and migration correctness on the event log, and build in robust observability to diagnose issues in production proactively.
• Optimize Data Processing: Identify and optimize inefficient processing and data access patterns across various data stores, including RocksDB, Elasticsearch/OpenSearch, and relational databases like PostgreSQL. Proactively address scalability bottlenecks.
• Team Leadership and Incident Management: Elevate the team through high-quality code reviews, mentorship, and winning technical debates through reasoned arguments, acting as a role model committed to product and team success. Take ownership of on-call incidents, drive resolutions, lead Root Cause Analysis (RCA), and integrate systemic fixes back into the platform.

Required Qualifications: What You Bring

• Product Empathy: Ability and/or willingness to effectively use Camunda's product.
• Extensive Backend Experience: Minimum of 5+ years of professional backend engineering experience with substantial depth in distributed and event-driven systems.
• Event Sourcing Expertise: Deep knowledge of event sourcing and distributed execution, including understanding consistency, ordering, replay, and common failure modes (partitions, crashes, duplicate/reordered delivery, idempotency, recovery).
• API Design Proficiency: Strong command of API design and evolution principles, including contract-first development, backward-compatible changes, versioning/deprecation, and thorough contract testing.
• Production Performance Tuning: Proven experience diagnosing and resolving performance issues under production load, utilizing profiling, benchmarking, and reasoning about tail-latency and backpressure.
• Technical Leadership in Ambiguity: Demonstrated ability to lead autonomously from ambiguous problem statements, break down undefined challenges, drive pragmatic technical decisions, engage in "disagree and commit" processes, and effectively mentor and level up other engineers.
• Exceptional Communication and Product Sense: Crisp technical writing skills (e.g., ADRs for asynchronous decision-making), strong remote-first collaboration abilities, deep product thinking, and a self-driven, "manager of one" mindset.

Desired Skills: Nice-to-haves

• Experience with workflow automation or process orchestration (e.g., BPMN).
• Awareness of consensus/replication protocols (e.g., Raft, SWIM) that underpin the engine, sufficient for designing correct engine behavior (the protocol layer is managed by another team).
• Deep query pattern optimization expertise in RocksDB, Elasticsearch/OpenSearch, and relational databases like PostgreSQL.
• Solid JVM knowledge, including memory model, concurrency, and performance optimization.

What We Have to Offer: Compensation and Benefits

Camunda provides competitive, fair, and transparent compensation structures, with salary ranges adjusted for location (Standard and Major global tech hubs) to reflect local market competition. The Annual Total Target Cash (base salary plus 100% variable target, if applicable) typically spans from the minimum in a Standard market to the maximum in a Major market. Final offers are based on skills, experience, and location, with hiring generally occurring within the first half of the range to facilitate future growth.

Example Salary Ranges:

• United States: $143,800.00 to $231,900.00 USD
• United Kingdom: £90,300.00 to £148,500.00 GBP
• Singapore: S$178,600.00 to S$267,900.00 SGD
• Canada: C$152,700.00 to C$251,200.00 CAD

For candidates based in other regions, hiring will be conducted via Remote.com (Camunda's global employer partner), and a personalized Total Rewards Calculator will be provided by your Talent Acquisition Partner after the initial interview.

Equity:

Equity is also offered (where applicable) through Camunda's Virtual Stock Option Plan (VSOP).

Benefits & Perks:

Camunda is committed to investing in your wellbeing, growth, and ability to connect, offering globally designed and locally delivered benefits and perks:

• Remote & Flexible Work: Enjoy the freedom to work from anywhere with your preferred setup, supported by a home office budget, co-working space assistance, and flexible time off to ensure adequate rest and recharge.
• In Person Connection: Camunda values meaningful face-to-face interactions, organizing an Annual Kickoff (e.g., Vienna in 2025, Madrid in 2026!), team offsites, and providing Camundi Connection Budgets, which include contributions for meetups while traveling and local gatherings.
• Health & Wellbeing: Access locally tailored healthcare benefits, global mental wellbeing support through Modern Health, and the Live Well Lifestyle Spending Account (LSA). The LSA is a flexible, global benefit empowering you to manage various aspects of your life, from staying active and caring for family to pursuing personal passions, meaningful experiences, and investing in financial wellbeing. This program launches in 2026 and scales to €1,000 annually from 2027.
• Financial Security: Benefit from retirement and pension plans (often with company contributions), along with life and disability insurance where applicable.
• Professional Growth: Receive up to $/€/£1,000 per year for self-driven learning, covering courses, certifications, and books, you choose your development path.

About Camunda's Hiring Process and Culture

Camunda may utilize AI tools in the application screening and interview stages. The company is an equal opportunity employer, committed to fostering an inclusive environment that empowers individuals and honors diverse cultures and backgrounds. All qualified applicants will receive consideration without regard to gender, race, ethnicity, religion, belief, sexual orientation, age, disability, or any other protected characteristics under applicable law.

Camunda looks forward to your application to join their journey and make an impact. Please be aware of potential scam attempts; Camunda will only contact candidates from email addresses ending in @camunda.com or @talent.camunda.com and will never request bank details, payments, or sensitive financial information during the hiring process. Recruiting and placement agencies are advised that Camunda does not accept unsolicited resumes.