About this role
Starburst builds an Enterprise Context Layer that transforms scattered data into governed and versioned Data Products, enabling business intelligence tools, applications, and AI agents to operate from a single trusted source. Engineers on this team design and maintain backend services that harvest business context from existing systems, manage certification workflows, and serve unified data across the platform. The role exists to drive foundational architecture in a fast-evolving product area where backend development intersects with AI integration and distributed systems.
Candidates joining this team will shape how organizations leverage Trino and Apache Iceberg for secure, governed enterprise intelligence. Ideal professionals bring a strong product mindset, extensive Java expertise, and the versatility to handle full-stack tasks or agentic coding tools with proper guardrails. Comfort with ambiguity and a focus on customer outcomes are essential for success in defining the future of decentralized data architecture.
What you will do
- Design, build, and operate backend services that collect and reconcile business context from various existing systems into Context Studio.
- Develop and evolve certification and versioning workflows that allow teams to trust a single definition of their metrics and data.
- Contribute to APIs and MCP-based integrations that permit AI agents and business intelligence tools to query certified context directly.
- Maintain reliability and data consistency for services merging and reconciling information from multiple sources simultaneously.
- Partner directly with product teams on feature definition and handle frontend, tooling, or full-stack work when necessary to unblock delivery.
- Work cross-functionally with other platform teams, including groups building AI-powered features, to ship context-aware capabilities.
- Provide considerate and timely reviews of peer pull requests and design proposals.
What you need
- Extensive software development experience utilizing Java, alongside versatility to work across the full stack when required.
- Demonstrated experience in designing, building, and operating distributed backend services in production environments.
- Practical background in designing and operating REST Application Programming Interfaces.
- Experience modeling and serving graph-structured or richly-relational data.
- Experience integrating Large Language Models into backend systems through structured extraction, prompt-based enrichment, or output evaluation.
- Comfort working in ambiguous and fast-evolving problem spaces where architecture remains under definition.
- Hands-on experience using agentic coding tools in production work while applying proper guardrails for testing, review, and verification.
Nice to have
- Experience with data catalogs
- Experience with semantic layers
- Experience with metadata or governance systems like dbt or Collibra
Benefits
- Competitive pay with a salary range of $185,000 to $215,000 USD
- Equity packages including ISOs
- Comprehensive benefits offering
- Flexible paid time off
Skills and tech stack
Questions candidates ask
Where is this role based and what is the remote policy?
This role can be based in Boston, MA, or remotely across the United States. It also requires 25% in-person travel for onboarding, team offsites, customer engagements, and company events.
What is the compensation for this position?
The salary range for this role is between $185,000 and $215,000 USD. Actual compensation packages are determined by relevant skills, experience, education, training, and work location.
What technologies will I primarily work with?
The core of the role involves Java-based backend work on distributed services. Engineers also interact with REST APIs, MCP-based integrations, Trino, and Apache Iceberg.