Senior Software Engineer, Context Layer

Starburst delivers enterprise intelligence by providing secure, governed access to distributed data environments. The company enables enterprises to power AI and analytics without traditional data consolidation costs, utilizing open standards such as Trino and Apache Iceberg. Starburst is trusted by leading global enterprises to fuel AI, analytics, and enterprise intelligence.

• Strong product thinking with a builder's mindset.
• Extensive software development experience with Java.
• Willingness and versatility to work across the stack including frontend, tooling, and infrastructure.
• Experience designing, building, and operating distributed backend services in production.
• Experience designing and operating REST APIs.
• Experience modeling and serving graph-structured or richly relational data.
• Experience integrating LLMs into backend systems for context harvesting and enrichment.
• Comfortable working in ambiguous, fast-evolving problem spaces.
• Hands-on experience with agentic coding tools including applying proper guardrails like testing and reviews.
• Demonstrated software engineering best practices.

Nice to have:

• Experience with data catalogs, semantic layers, or metadata/governance systems such as dbt or Collibra.
• Ability to travel approximately 25% for onboarding, offsites, customer engagements, and company events.

• Design, build, and operate backend services that collect and reconcile business context into governed Context Studio.
• Build and evolve certification and versioning workflows for trusted data metrics.
• Contribute to APIs and MCP-based integrations for AI agents and BI tools.
• Ensure reliability and data consistency for data merging services.
• Collaborate directly with product teams on feature development and unblock tasks including frontend and tooling work.
• Work cross-functionally with teams building AI-powered features.
• Review peers' pull requests and design proposals in a timely and considerate manner.

This role requires approximately 25% in-person travel for onboarding, offsites, customer engagements, and company events.