SlipstreamJobs tracks this role from the company's public career site. Apply directly on the employer's site.
Salary: USD 185,000 - 215,000 / annual
Starburst delivers enterprise intelligence at scale by giving organizations secure, governed access to all their data, wherever it lives. The Enterprise Context Layer team is building backend services that harvest business context from existing systems, govern it through certification and versioning workflows, and serve it to both people and AI agents across the platform.
In this Senior Software Engineer role, you will design, build, and operate backend services that collect and reconcile business context from various systems into governed Context Studio. You'll build and evolve certification and versioning workflows that enable teams to trust a single definition of their metrics and data. You'll contribute to APIs and MCP-based integrations that allow AI agents and BI tools to query certified context directly, and own reliability and data consistency for services that merge and reconcile information from many sources.
You'll 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. You'll work cross-functionally with teams across the platform, including those building AI-powered features, to ship context-aware capabilities. You'll also provide considerate, timely review of peers' pull requests and design proposals.
This is a fast-evolving product area where you'll have real influence over foundational architecture decisions rather than executing against a fully-specified spec. The role requires a builder's mindset with strong product thinking — caring about the "why" behind features, not just implementation elegance.
Note: This role requires 25% in-person travel for new hire onboarding, team and department offsites, customer engagements, and other company events.
REQUIREMENTS:
- Extensive software development experience with Java, with versatility and willingness to work across the full stack (frontend, tooling, infra) 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 (structured extraction, prompt-based enrichment, or evaluating LLM output for 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 judgment to apply proper guardrails (testing, review, verification steps)
- Demonstrated experience with software engineering best practices
- Bonus: experience with data catalogs, semantic layers, or metadata/governance systems (e.g., dbt, Collibra)
