Software Engineer, Backend - Distributed Systems

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 transforming into an AI-first organisation, built on our own platform.

About The Role

As a Senior Software Engineer, Backend on Camunda’s Distributed Systems team, you’ll help build and evolve the durable, highly available, horizontally scalable streaming platform that underpins Camunda 8’s Orchestration Cluster and powers mission-critical processes for customers around the world. As part of the Distributed Systems team, you will work on technically challenging and rewarding projects, such as expanding on our multi-Raft implementation, our SWIM-based cluster membership algorithm, or high performance network and disk I/O pipelines. At Camunda, we approach engineering in a holistic manner. You will form strong partnerships with product management, design, QA, and sales, and work with your peers to not only deliver but directly influence the evolution of our platform to meet our customer’s needs.

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.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and maintain backend services for the distributed streaming platform that powers the foundation for Camunda 8’s orchestration capabilities, ensuring durability, high availability, and horizontal scalability.
• Lead medium-to-large engineering initiatives (3+ months) end-to-end: partner with Product to translate business problems into technical requirements, write solution designs, draft and maintain project plans, and drive timely, high-quality delivery.
• Help mature our disaster recovery and resilience story, including implementing and evolving an online backup/restore API and contributing to improved multi-region and multi-tenant capabilities for our cloud offering.
• Design and implement developer and operator tooling that makes it easier to understand, troubleshoot, and safely operate a complex distributed system in production environments.
• Improve engineering effectiveness by collaborating with DevOps and other Core Application teams on CI, testing, and local development workflows to reduce PR time-to-merge and the overhead of working on multiple features in parallel.
• Participate in L3 support and on-call rotations, partnering closely with Support and SRE to investigate and resolve complex, performance-sensitive production issues, and feeding what you learn back into our product and platform.

Requirements

• 7+ years of professional experience as a software engineer, with a strong focus on backend systems and/or distributed systems.
• Proven experience leading medium-to-large engineering initiatives (roughly 3+ months), breaking down ambiguous problems, writing clear solution designs and project plans, coordinating with multiple teams, and driving predictable delivery.
• Hands-on experience building and maintaining highly concurrent, data-intensive software, with a deep understanding of low-level network and disk I/O (for example, throughput, latency, backpressure, batching, and failure modes).
• Demonstrated ability to work autonomously and navigate ambiguity – you are comfortable taking on problems you haven’t solved before, breaking them down into concrete steps, and driving them to completion with minimal supervision.
• Strong communication and collaboration skills in a remote-first environment: you tailor explanations to your audience, translate business requirements into actionable technical work with Product, and help teams reach clear, decisive outcomes with minimal churn.

Skills

• Nice to have: Experience building workflow automation or process orchestration software.
• Nice to have: Experience with distributed systems algorithms or protocols such as Raft, Paxos, SWIM, and/or CRDTs.
• Nice to have: Strong familiarity with the observability pillars (logging, metrics, tracing) and how to integrate observability into the development and incident lifecycle, ideally including experience with L3 support and on-call.
• Nice to have: Deep knowledge of the Java Virtual Machine, especially its memory model and performance characteristics in highly concurrent, data-intensive workloads.

Pay

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

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.

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

Benefits

• 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 (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, 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!