# Staff Software Engineer

**Company:** [Starburst](https://hotfix.jobs/companies/starburst)
**Location:** Warsaw, Poland
**Role:** Backend Engineering
**Salary:** PLN440k – PLN540k/yr
**Experience:** 8+ years
**Skills:** Java, Jvm, Distributed Systems, REST APIs, Openapi, Kubernetes, Helm, Docker, CI/CD, GitHub Actions, Jenkins, AWS, Amazon S3, IAM, Aws Sso
**Posted:** 2026-04-24

> The Staff Software Engineer will lead backend and platform development for distributed compute orchestration using Java, Spark, and Trino. The role requires 8+ years of backend experience, architectural leadership, and hands-on expertise across Kubernetes, Docker, CI/CD, AWS, APIs, and enterprise authentication.

## Job Description

## Responsibilities
- Own critical backend and platform components that orchestrate distributed compute, including Spark and Trino, for enterprise customers.
- Lead the design and implementation of JVM-based services and surrounding infrastructure, including Kubernetes deployments, Docker image strategy, CI/CD automation, AWS integrations, and secure enterprise authentication flows.
- Provide architectural leadership, influence across teams, and long-term platform ownership.
- Drive architecture across multiple services or systems.
- Lead 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.
- Travel approximately 25% for onboarding, team and department offsites, customer engagements, and other company events.

## Requirements
- 8+ years of professional backend experience.
- 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, including authoring manifests and Helm charts.
- Strong Docker experience, including multi-stage builds, image optimization, and 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 and policies, and AWS SSO.
- Familiarity with OAuth2, OIDC, token-based authentication, and session management.

## Nice to Have
- Experience with Spark, Trino, Presto, or comparable distributed compute engines.
- Experience implementing metrics, preferably with Prometheus, distributed tracing with OpenTelemetry, and structured logging for JVM services.
- Experience building job orchestration platforms.
- Experience working in enterprise or B2B environments.
- Strong Python skills for automation and tooling.
- Experience running systems in hybrid or on-premises environments.
- Contributions to open-source projects.

## Compensation and Benefits
- Salary range: 440,000–540,000 PLN annually.
- Competitive total rewards program, including competitive pay, stock grants, flexible paid time off, and other benefits.
- Hybrid work model based in the Warsaw office, with an expectation of being onsite 2–3 days per week.

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**Apply:** https://hotfix.jobs/jobs/f571d823-c449-4ee9-8867-8911516fbf41
**Canonical:** https://hotfix.jobs/jobs/f571d823-c449-4ee9-8867-8911516fbf41