Senior Software Engineer, Context Layer

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. Leading global enterprises trust Starburst to fuel AI, analytics, and enterprise intelligence. Learn more at starburst.ai.

About the role

Starburst's Enterprise Context Layer turns scattered data into governed, versioned Data Products — 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 the 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. We're looking for builders with strong product instincts — engineers who care as much about the customer outcome as the technical solution, and who are comfortable moving across the stack when that's the fastest path to shipping value, even though the core of this role is Java-based backend work.

As a Senior Software Engineer at Starburst you will:

• Design, build, and operate backend services that collect and reconcile business context from a variety of existing systems into governed Context Studio.
• Build and evolve the certification and versioning workflow that lets teams trust a single definition of their metrics and data.
• Contribute to the APIs and MCP-based integrations that let AI agents and BI tools query certified context directly.
• Own reliability and data consistency for services that merge and reconcile information from many sources at once.
• Partner directly with product on what gets built, not just how — and pick up frontend, tooling, or other full-stack work when it's the fastest way to unblock a feature or validate an idea.
• Work cross-functionally with teams across the platform, including those building AI-powered features, to ship context-aware capabilities.
• Provide considerate, timely review of your peers' pull requests and design proposals.

Some of the things we look for:

• A builder's mindset with strong product thinking — you care about the "why" behind a feature, not just the elegance of the implementation.
• Extensive software development experience with Java, with the versatility and willingness to work across the full stack — frontend, tooling, infra — when the problem calls for it.
• 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 — structured extraction, prompt-based enrichment, or evaluating LLM output for correctness — relevant to how we help harvest and enrich context.
• 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 the judgment to apply proper guardrails — testing, review, verification steps — so speed doesn't come at the cost of code quality or correctness.
• Demonstrated experience with software engineering best practices.
• Bonus: experience with data catalogs, semantic layers, or metadata/governance systems (e.g., dbt, Collibra) is a plus, not required.
• Ability to Travel: This role will require 25% in-person travel for purposes including but not limited to new hire onboarding, team and department offsites, customer engagements, and other company events. Actual travel expectations may vary by role and business needs.

Where could this role be based?

• Boston, MA / Remote, US

Starburst is dedicated to maintaining fair and equitable compensation practices. The salary range provided for this role reflects the minimum and maximum targets for candidates across all U.S. locations and could be inclusive of variable compensation, such as commission or bonus. All employees receive equity packages (ISOs) and have access to a comprehensive benefits offering. Actual compensation packages are determined based on relevant skills, experience, education and training, and specific work location. For more information, connect with the recruiting team or Hiring Manager during the process as they can provide more detailed information about the salary range.

Pay Range

$185,000—$215,000 USD

Build your career at Starburst

All-Stars have the opportunity and freedom to realize their true potential. By building alongside top talent, we’re empowered to take ownership of our careers and drive meaningful change. Anchored in industry-proven technology and unprecedented success, All-Stars are taking on the challenge everyday to disrupt our industry –  and the future. 

Our global workforce is supported by a competitive Total Rewards program that reflects our commitment to a rewarding and supportive work environment. This includes a variety of benefits like competitive pay, attractive stock grants, flexible paid time off, and more. 

We are committed to fostering an intentional, inclusive, and diverse culture that drives deep engagement, authentic belonging, and an exceptional All-Star experience. We believe that diversity of thought, perspective, background and experience will enable us to own what we do, drive our success and empower our All-Stars to show up authentically.

Starburst provides equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants for employment and prohibits discrimination and harassment of any type without regard to race, color, religion, age, sex, national origin, disability status, genetics, protected veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state
 or local laws.