Staff Software Engineer

Starburst delivers enterprise intelligence at scale by providing secure, governed access to all organizational data across distributed data environments. The company leverages open standards including Trino and Apache Iceberg to power AI and analytics for leading global enterprises while avoiding vendor lock-in.

• 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. Experience with Spark, Trino/Presto, or comparable distributed compute engines is a strong plus.
• Extensive experience designing and evolving RESTful APIs with validation, error modeling, pagination, filtering, backward-compatible versioning, and OpenAPI documentation.
• Hands-on production experience with Kubernetes (manifests/Helm charts) and strong Docker experience including multi-stage builds and image optimization.
• Experience owning CI/CD for complex Java codebases using GitHub Actions (preferred) or Jenkins.
• Practical AWS experience with S3 (or S3-compatible storage), IAM roles/policies, and AWS SSO.
• Familiarity with authentication mechanisms: OAuth2 / OIDC, token-based auth, and session management.
• Experience with metrics collection (Prometheus preferred), distributed tracing (OpenTelemetry), and structured logging for JVM services is a plus.
• Proven experience leading architecture across multiple services or systems.
• Ability to drive cross-team RFCs, break down ambiguous problems, influence standards, and mentor through code reviews.
• Experience building job orchestration platforms (highly preferred).
• Experience in enterprise / B2B environments (highly preferred).
• Strong Python skills for automation and tooling (highly preferred).
• Experience running systems in hybrid or on-prem environments (highly preferred).
• Collaboration on open-source projects is a strong plus.

• Own critical backend and platform components orchestrating distributed compute for enterprise customers.
• Lead design and implementation of JVM-based services and surrounding infrastructure such as Kubernetes deployments, Docker image strategy, CI/CD automation, AWS integrations, and secure enterprise authentication flows.
• Provide architectural leadership and influence engineering standards across teams.
• Lead long-term platform ownership for stability and scalability.

This role requires approximately 25% in-person travel for onboarding, offsites, customer engagements, and other events. The position is based in Warsaw, Poland, and follows a hybrid model with onsite presence 2-3 days per week.