Senior Software Engineer, Context Layer
Starburst · Boston, MA
About this role
**About Starburst** 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. Learn more at http://starburst.ai. --- **About the role** Starburst's *Enterprise Context Layer* turns scattered data into governed, versioned **Data Products**—including business definitions, access policy, and lineage built in—so BI tools, applications, and AI agents all work from the same trusted answer. As a **Senior Software Engineer** on this team, you’ll build backend services that harvest business context from where it already lives, govern it through a certification and versioning workflow, and serve it to both people and AI agents across the platform. This is a fast-evolving product area, so you’ll have real influence over foundational architecture decisions rather than executing against a fully-specified spec. The core of this role is **Java-based backend work**, with flexibility to move across the stack when it’s the fastest path to shipping value. --- **What you’ll do** - Design, build, and operate backend services that collect and reconcile business context from existing systems into **governed Context Studio** - Build and evolve the **certification and versioning workflow** so teams can trust a single definition of their metrics and data - Contribute to **APIs** and **MCP-based integrations** so AI agents and BI tools can query certified context directly - Own **reliability** and **data consistency** for services that merge and reconcile information from many sources - Partner directly with product on what gets built (not just how), and pick up frontend/tooling/full-stack work when it unblocks a feature or validates an idea - Work cross-functionally across the platform, including teams building AI-powered features - Provide considerate, timely review of peers’ pull requests and design proposals --- **What we’re looking for** - A builder’s mindset with strong product thinking (care about the *why* behind features) - Extensive software development experience with **Java**, with willingness to work across the stack when needed - 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 (e.g., structured extraction, prompt-based enrichment, or evaluating correctness) - Comfort working in ambiguous, fast-evolving problem spaces where architecture is still being defined - Hands-on experience using **agentic coding tools** in real production work, with strong judgment and guardrails (testing, review, verification) - Demonstrated experience with software engineering best practices - **Bonus:** experience with data catalogs, semantic layers, or metadata/governance systems (e.g., dbt, Collibra) **Travel**: ~25% in-person travel for onboarding, offsites, customer engagements, and other company events (expectations may vary). --- **Where this role could be based** - Boston, MA / Remote (US) --- **Pay Range (US)** - **$185,00
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