Software Engineer, Backend - Core/API & Process Automation

About this role

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, https://www.gpbullhound.com/articles/top-100-next-unicorns-the-uk-france-and-germany-lead-with-the-most-promising-technology-companies-in-europe/ 2025 Great Place to Work certified. Visionary in 2025 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ https://page.camunda.com/wp-2025-gartner-magic-quadrant-for-boat for Business Orchestration and Automation Technologies. ranked 3rd in Flexa's 2026 Most Flexible Companies https://flexa.careers/companies/camunda, 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 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 https://www.camundacon.com/event-session/camundacon-amsterdam-2025/one-exporter-to-rule-them-all-exploring-camunda-exporter/?on_demand=true 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.

Must Haves:

- Ability and/or willingness to use our product https://accounts.cloud.camunda.io/signup?_ga=2.47330343.127558761.1654184528-504024057.1654184528

- 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.

 Nice-to-haves:

- 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.

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