Software Engineer, Backend – Core/API & Process Automation

Camunda is the enterprise platform for agentic orchestration, letting organisations coordinate AI agents, people and systems across complex end-to-end business processes with governance, auditability and human oversight built in. Over 700 organisations use it, including nine of the top ten US banks.

Fully remote and global, ranked 3rd in Flexa's 2026 Most Flexible Companies, named to GP Bullhound's Top 100 Next Unicorn list, and a Visionary in the 2025 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Business Orchestration and Automation Technologies.

THE ROLE

You would work on the Core / API and Process Automation team, on Camunda 8 itself: the event-sourced, distributed workflow engine that executes business-critical processes for thousands of customers and, through them, millions of people.

Camunda describe the stakes plainly. Because you sit at the core, one well-made improvement propagates outward through every integration and product built on top of it. The bar is unforgiving: data must never be corrupted and a process must never get stuck, because when it does, customers lose money.

The problems named are genuinely hard ones: performance of the hot paths, versioning strategies for an engine that must faithfully replay every event it has ever written, and concurrency between the engine advancing a process and a user mutating that same process in the same instant. As they put it, this is real distributed-systems work, not another CRUD app.

Everything ships in the open, since Zeebe is open source.

WHY THIS ONE IS WORTH A LOOK

It asks for 2+ years of backend experience. That is an unusually low bar for work of this kind, and Camunda frame it as a role where you grow fast: you own well-scoped work end to end, deliberately take on unfamiliar problems, and learn from senior engineers alongside you.

Core distributed-systems roles are normally reserved for senior hires. This is a rare route in.

WHAT YOU WILL BE DOING

• Build and evolve features in the event-sourced engine and its C8 REST, gRPC and MCP API, with guidance on the harder design calls
• Own well-scoped work end to end, and write clear design notes and ADRs
• Ship high-impact engine features such as suspending and resuming individual process instances, enabling AI agents to steer running processes, and variable tracing
• Design and consume clean APIs with good contracts and backward-compatibility awareness
• Detect and optimise inefficient processing and data-access patterns across RocksDB, Elasticsearch/OpenSearch and Postgres, and build observability into what you ship
• Flag issues and tech debt, keep quality high through reviews and testing, and take part in support and on-call as you ramp

MUST HAVES

• Willingness to use Camunda's own product
• 2+ years professional backend engineering experience
• Solid grasp of event-driven systems and eagerness to go deep on event sourcing and distributed systems, including consistency, ordering and failure basics
• Good REST API design instincts
• Product thinking, caring about the user outcome rather than the ticket
• Strong "manager of one" — owning your work without day-to-day management in a remote async setting
• High growth drive, actively taking on unfamiliar and uncomfortable challenges
• Clear written communication in a remote-first async setting

NICE TO HAVES

Workflow automation or process orchestration such as BPMN, query patterns in Elasticsearch/OpenSearch and Postgres, observability tooling, and working JVM knowledge.

COMPENSATION

Annual Total Target Cash, combining base and full variable target, spanning the minimum in a standard market to the maximum in a major tech hub:

• United States: $119,900 to $193,200
• United Kingdom: £75,300 to £123,800
• Singapore: S$148,900 to S$223,300

Based elsewhere, you are hired via Remote.com as global employer partner, with a personalised Total Rewards Calculator after your first interview. Equity is available through the Virtual Stock Option Plan.

BENEFITS

• Work from anywhere, with home office budget, co-working support and flexible time off
• Annual Kickoff (Madrid in 2026), team offsites, and Camundi Connection Budgets covering meetups while travelling
• Locally tailored healthcare and Modern Health for global mental wellbeing
• Live Well Lifestyle Spending Account, launching 2026 and scaling to EUR 1,000 annually from 2027
• Retirement and pension plans, plus life and disability insurance where relevant
• Up to 1,000 USD, EUR or GBP per year for self-driven learning

BEFORE YOU APPLY

Camunda discloses that it may use AI tools to aid screening of applications and during interviews.

The company also publishes a scam warning: it only contacts candidates from an address ending in @camunda.com, and never asks for bank details or payment during hiring.