Senior Software Engineer - Context Layer

About the role

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. 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.

As a Senior Software Engineer at Starburst you will:

• 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.

Some of the things we look for:

• 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.
• 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?

• Boston, MA / Remote, US

Pay Range 185000 - 215000 USD