Senior Software Engineer, Starburst
Context Layer
$185-215k
+ Equity
More information about location
Data platform for analytics, apps and AI
Be an early applicant
Data platform for analytics, apps and AI
501-1000 employees
Be an early applicant
$185-215k
+ Equity
More information about location
501-1000 employees
Company mission
To free customers from the tyranny of data lock-in.
Role
Who you are
- 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
- 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
What the job involves
- 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
- 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
Our take
Starburst offers a unified platform for accessing distributed data from various databases through its Trino-based query engine. This approach helps users cut infrastructure and analytics costs by providing a single point of access. As the Data Lakes market grows nearly 30% annually, Starburst is well-positioned to help businesses manage their increasingly complex data.
The company has recently gained recognition for its advanced capabilities in data management. Starburst emphasizes the importance of real-time hybrid data access and robust security, especially for AI applications. Its latest report, developed in collaboration with TheCUBE Research, underscores how effective data management practices are essential for successful AI implementation.s
Key findings from the report include the critical need for real-time data access and the alignment of data strategies with AI goals. These insights highlight how Starburst's technology supports efficient AI deployment and data management.
Kirsty
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
17% employee growth in 12 months
Company
Funding (last 2 of 4 rounds)
Feb 2022
$250m
SERIES D
Dec 2020
$100m
SERIES C
Total funding: $414m
Company benefits
- Comprehensive Health Insurance Coverage
- Life Insurance, Disability, and Income Protection
- Employee assistance Programs
- Flexible Paid Time Off
- Paid Parental Leave
- Remote Work Opportunties
- Equity Ownership
Company HQ
Fort Point Channel Landmark District, Boston, MA
Leadership
Justin Borgman
(CEO & Chairman)Founder and CEO of Starburst's precursor company Hadapt, which was acquired by Terdata in 2014. Served as VP & GM at Teradata before co-relaunching Hadapt as Starburst in 2017.
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