[Hiring] Software Engineer, Backend - Core/API & Process Automation @Camunda

Role Description

Backend engineering rarely gets this consequential. As a 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 dig into the performance of the hot paths, into versioning strategies for an engine that must faithfully replay every event it has ever written — forever, and into the concurrency between the engine advancing a process and a user mutating that same process in the same instant. And the bar is unforgiving: data must never be corrupted, and a process must never get stuck — because when it does, customers lose money. This is genuine distributed-systems work — event sourcing, ordering, concurrency, replay — not another CRUD app.

You'll also help build what comes next — including enabling AI agents to drive the engine, cutting-edge work that stretches what the industry thinks automation can do. You'll do it alongside a world-spanning team of highly skilled, highly motivated engineers who share one goal: make Camunda the best workflow engine in the world. And this is where you grow fast: you'll own well-scoped work end-to-end, deliberately take on unfamiliar and uncomfortable problems to stretch yourself, and learn from senior engineers you work beside every day — with everything shipping in the open (Zeebe is open source).

Curious about the kind of challenges you'll work on at Camunda? Watch this quick 30-minute talk from our engineers to learn more about the new Camunda Exporter and how we’re solving complex problems at scale.

What You’ll Be Doing:

• Build and evolve features in the event-sourced engine and its C8 REST/gRPC/MCP API (command/event, CQRS), with guidance on the harder design calls.
• Own well-scoped work end-to-end — implement, test, and ship; contribute your ideas to solution designs and write clear design notes / ADRs.
• Help ship high-impact engine features — like suspending and resuming individual process instances, enabling AI agents to steer running processes, and variable tracing — and watch them reach thousands of customers.
• Design and consume clean APIs — good contracts, developer ergonomics, and an awareness of not breaking existing integrations.
• Detect and optimize inefficient processing and data-access patterns across our data stores (RocksDB, Elasticsearch/OpenSearch, relational/Postgres) — growing into the harder cases — and build observability into what you ship.
• Proactively flag issues and tech debt, keep quality high through reviews and testing (collaborative, not a lone hero), and participate in support / on-call as you ramp.

Qualifications

• Ability and/or willingness to use our product.
• 2+ years professional backend engineering experience.
• Solid grasp of event-driven systems and genuine eagerness to go deep on event sourcing / distributed systems — including a working understanding of consistency, ordering, and failure basics.
• Good API design instincts (REST) — clean, sensible contracts, with awareness of backward compatibility.
• Product thinking — you care about the outcome for users, not just the ticket.
• Strong "manager of one" — own your work and drive it forward without day-to-day management, manage your own time and focus in a remote/async setting, communicate progress and raise blockers early (self-directed, but knows when to ask for help), and reliably follow through on what you commit to.
• High growth drive — genuinely ambitious to level up, and actively takes on unfamiliar, uncomfortable challenges rather than staying in the comfort zone.
• Clear written communication in a remote-first, async setting.

Requirements

• Experience with workflow automation / process orchestration (BPMN or similar).
• Comfort reasoning about query patterns in Elasticsearch/OpenSearch and relational/Postgres.
• Familiarity with observability (logging, metrics, tracing).
• Working JVM knowledge.

Benefits

• Competitive, fair, and transparent compensation.
• Equity (where applicable) through our Virtual Stock Option Plan (VSOP).
• Remote & Flexible: Work from anywhere with the setup that suits you, home office budget, co-working space support, and flexible time off to recharge when you need it.
• In Person Connection: Annual Kickoff, team offsites, and Camundi Connection Budgets.
• Health & Wellbeing: Access to locally tailored healthcare, Modern Health for global mental wellbeing, and the Live Well Lifestyle Spending Account (LSA).
• Financial Security: Retirement and pension plans (often with company contributions), plus life and disability insurance where relevant.
• Professional Growth: Up to $/€/£1,000 per year for self-driven learning: courses, certifications, books, you decide!