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. 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.

Named GP Bullhound’s Top 100 Next Unicorn list, 2025 Great Place to Work certified. Visionary in 2025 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Business Orchestration and Automation Technologies. ranked 3rd in Flexa's 2026 Most Flexible Companies, We’re growing fast and looking for top talent to join our team. If you want meaningful work, visible impact and put something genuinely rare on your CV, keep reading.

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.

You'll also help define what comes next. Enabling AI agents to integrate with and drive the engine is cutting-edge work, and the features we ship create real aha moments and stretch 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. As a senior here you set the technical bar — you take ambiguous problems and give them shape, lead the hard discussions, and make the people around you better.

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:

•  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.

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 (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.

 Nice-to-haves:

• 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).

This role is an existing vacancy

#LI-SK1 #LI-Remote #C1

What We Have to Offer:

Compensation

We offer competitive, fair, and transparent compensation. Salary ranges are location-based, with Standard and Major markets (global tech hubs) reflecting local competition.

The Annual Total Target Cash (base salary + 100% variable target, where applicable) shown below spans from the minimum in a Standard market to the maximum in a Major market. Final offers depend on skills, experience, and location, and we typically hire in the first half of the range to allow room for growth:

United States: $143,800.00 to $231,900.00

United Kingdom: £90,300.00 to £148,500.00

Singapore: S$178,600.00 to S$267,900.00

Canada: C$152,700.00 to C$251,200.00

If you’re based elsewhere, you’ll be hired via Remote.com (our global employer partner), and your Talent Acquisition Partner will provide a personalized Total Rewards Calculator after your first interview.

Equity: We also offer equity (where applicable) through our Virtual Stock Option Plan (VSOP).

Benefits & Perks

We invest in your wellbeing, growth, and ability to connect, along with perks that support you no matter where you’re based. Our benefits are globally designed and locally delivered where applicable.

• 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: We invest in meaningful face time through our Annual Kickoff (Vienna in 2025, Madrid in 2026!), team offsites, and Camundi Connection Budgets, including contributing to meetups while travelling,, and local gatherings with fellow Camundi.

• Health & Wellbeing: Access locally tailored healthcare, Modern Health for global mental wellbeing, and our Live Well Lifestyle Spending Account (LSA), a flexible, global benefit that puts you in control of your whole life, not just work, from: staying active, to caring for family, exploring personal passions, meaningful experiences, and investing in your financial wellbeing. The Live Well program launches in 2026 and scales to €1,000 annually from 2027.

• 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!

”Everyone is welcome at Camunda” — it’s a celebrated component of our culture. We strive to create an inclusive environment that empowers our people. At Camunda, we honour diverse cultures and backgrounds and are proud to be an equal opportunity employer. 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. We are looking forward to your application!

Come join us and be part of Camunda’s incredible journey: Make an impact at a pivotal moment in our story!

AI in our hiring process: Camunda may use AI tools to aid the screening of applications and during the interview process. You can learn more here