Staff Engineer

Starburst delivers enterprise intelligence at scale by giving organizations secure, governed access to all their data, wherever it lives. Built for distributed data environments, Starburst helps enterprises power AI and analytics without the cost and complexity of traditional data consolidation. With open standards including Trino and Apache Iceberg, Starburst enables trusted access to complete enterprise context while helping organizations avoid vendor lock-in. Leading global enterprises trust Starburst to fuel AI, analytics, and enterprise intelligence.

• 8+ years of professional backend experience with strong expertise in Java and production experience building JVM-based services.
• Experience designing and operating distributed systems in production.
• Extensive experience designing and evolving RESTful APIs including validation, error modeling, pagination, filtering, backward-compatible versioning, and OpenAPI documentation.
• Hands-on production experience with Kubernetes (authoring manifests/Helm charts) and strong Docker experience (multi-stage builds, image optimization, security best practices).
• Experience owning CI/CD for complex Java codebases using GitHub Actions or Jenkins.
• Practical AWS experience with S3 or S3-compatible object storage, IAM roles/policies, and AWS SSO.
• Familiarity with secure authentication mechanisms: OAuth2 / OIDC, token-based auth, and session management.
• Experience implementing Metrics (Prometheus preferred), Distributed tracing (OpenTelemetry), and structured logging for JVM services is a plus.
• Proven experience leading architecture across multiple services or systems.
• Demonstrated ability to drive cross-team RFCs, break down ambiguous problems, influence engineering standards, and raise the technical bar through code reviews and mentorship.
• Own long-term platform health, not just feature delivery.

Highly Preferred Experience:

• Experience building job orchestration platforms.
• Experience working in enterprise / B2B environments.
• Strong Python skills for automation and tooling.
• Experience running systems in hybrid or on-prem environments.
• Collaboration on open-source projects is a strong plus.

• Own critical backend and platform components that orchestrate distributed compute (Spark, Trino) for enterprise customers.
• Lead the design and implementation of JVM-based services and the surrounding infrastructure, including Kubernetes deployments, Docker image strategy, CI/CD automation, AWS integrations, and secure enterprise authentication flows.
• Provide architectural leadership, cross-team influence, and long-term platform ownership.