Staff Software Engineer

About the role

Starburst is looking for an experienced Staff Software Engineer to sit at the intersection of software engineering and data engineering — building the internal platforms, pipelines, and data products that power how we understand our customers and our business. You'll work across Starburst Enterprise and Starburst Galaxy, using our own technology to solve real problems at scale, while also contributing software that other teams depend on.

Because data engineers are one of our primary target personas, you'll bring a uniquely valuable perspective: you'll use our products daily and feed that experience directly back into how we build and improve them. You'll work closely with a dynamic, talented, globally distributed team, writing production-quality software alongside building reliable data systems — with a consistent emphasis on quality, maintainability, and speed to insight.

As a Staff Software Engineer at Starburst you will:

• Design, build, and operate a high-quality data lake and the software systems that feed it, supporting product management, finance, customer support, and engineering
• Write production-grade software — services, APIs, tooling, and automation — that enables data workflows and integrations at scale
• Find innovative ways to use Trino and Starburst to solve complex data management and software architecture challenges
• Collaborate with technical leads, product managers, and data analysts to build robust data products and analytics
• Leverage AI to democratize access to datasets for users throughout Starburst, including building and maintaining the software infrastructure that makes this possible
• Enable dataset preparation and model evaluation for Starburst's AI projects
• Define and evolve engineering processes and best practices that span both software and data domains, with a focus on reliability and actionable results
• Work closely with leaders across teams to iterate on data architecture and the software systems that implement it, keeping quality high at every layer
• Identify emerging patterns in data management and software engineering, and work with Starburst's product teams to bring those innovations to market

Some of the things we look for

• A Trino enthusiast looking to push the bounds in an AI future
• At least 7 years of combined experience in software engineering and/or data engineering, with genuine depth in both
• Strong software engineering fundamentals: writing clean, testable, well-reviewed code in Java, Python, or Scala
• Experience building and optimizing data pipelines using Trino, Spark, dbt, and related frameworks
• Experience designing and building backend services, APIs, and data platform components
• Experience managing data and application infrastructure in public clouds, particularly AWS (EMR, EC2, S3, IAM); multi-cloud experience (GCP/Azure) is a plus
• Experience using and managing orchestration frameworks such as Apache Airflow or Dagster
• Knowledge of RAG and other design patterns for AI-powered applications
• Fluency in SQL and comfort moving between SQL and general-purpose programming as the task demands
• Experience building API integrations for extracting data from third-party sources
• Knowledge of data modeling techniques appropriate for modern data lakes
• Proficiency with Configuration-as-Code and Infrastructure-as-Code tools such as Pulumi, Terraform, and/or Ansible
• A track record of shipping reliable software and data systems on time, with disciplined practices around testing, code quality, and review
• Strong written and verbal communication skills, with the organizational ability to coordinate across teams
• 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?

• India