SlipstreamJobs tracks this role from the company's public career site. Apply directly on the employer's site.
Starburst is building the AI layer for its products, including AIDA, an agent platform that lets users ask questions in natural language and get accurate, grounded answers backed by their actual data. The team operates with startup speed inside an enterprise company, shipping weekly and measuring results.
As the first dedicated platform engineering hire on the AI team, you will be a force multiplier—building shared development primitives, SDKs, and tooling that enable multiple product teams to ship faster. Instead of building product features directly, you own the developer experience for agent development at Starburst, scaling from 0 to 1 across teams. Your impact is measured by other engineers' velocity, not your own feature output.
Key responsibilities include:
- Design and build an agent development SDK that abstracts common patterns: tool registration, context management, evaluation hooks, and prompt management
- Build the language bridge between Python (AI ecosystem) and JVM (Starburst platform) with type safety, error propagation, and observability across the boundary
- Create developer tooling: local development environments, debugging tools, test harnesses, and CI integration
- Define and maintain API contracts between the AI layer and the Starburst platform
- Build shared infrastructure: model gateway, observability pipeline, and experiment framework
- Develop unified, product-agnostic components used across multiple products
- Own platform health beyond feature delivery: performance, reliability, and developer ergonomics
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. The company uses open standards including Trino and Apache Iceberg to enable trusted access to complete enterprise context while helping organizations avoid vendor lock-in.
Requirements:
- 5+ years of software engineering experience, with at least 2 years building platform, infrastructure, or developer tooling
- Proficiency in both Python and JVM languages (Java or Kotlin)
- Experience designing APIs and SDKs consumed by other engineering teams
- Strong distributed systems fundamentals: RPC, serialization, error handling, observability
- Experience with containerization, CI/CD pipelines, and cloud infrastructure (AWS preferred)
- Track record of building tools that measurably improve other engineers' velocity
Preferred qualifications:
- Experience with LLM integration patterns: model APIs, token management, streaming, tool use
- Experience with cross-language interop (gRPC, FFI, language bridges)
- Open-source contributions to developer tooling or infrastructure projects
- Familiarity with A/B testing frameworks and experiment infrastructure
- Experience supporting both research and production workloads on the same platform
- Java agent framework experience (LangChain4j)
- Ability to travel 25% for onboarding, team offsites, customer engagements, and company events
