Systems Software Engineer

About Starburst

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. With open standards including Trino and Apache Iceberg, Starburst enables trusted access to complete enterprise context while helping organizations avoid vendor lock-in. Leading global enterprises trust Starburst to fuel AI, analytics, and enterprise intelligence. Learn more at starburst.ai.

About the role

As a Senior Systems Software Engineer on the Build & Delivery team, you'll own the systems that every team at Starburst ships through — the backend services and infrastructure of one trusted, self-service, increasingly autonomous delivery platform. You will help design and build the core delivery infrastructure, as well as build “the machine that builds the machine” that is used to ship across Starburst Enterprise, Galaxy, and customer-managed deployments at scale. Daily tasks will include developing backend services and infrastructure, building operational tooling, supporting our platform in production, and driving the reliability, scalability, and cost-efficiency of how we deliver software.

The problems are concrete: keep the mainline green by construction, so a red build always means a real defect; provision production-like environments on demand instead of a shared staging bottleneck; deliver testing as a service across every repo; and treat AI as a first responder for test maintenance, failure triage, and remediation.

As a Senior Systems Software Engineer you will:

• Design and build the core services and infrastructure of the delivery platform, following the immutable cloud infrastructure paradigm, consistent across Starburst Enterprise, Galaxy, and customer-managed deployments
• Build the merge-orchestration and gating systems that keep the mainline green by construction, including flaky-test detection and auto-quarantine
• Build Testing-as-a-Service — shared, on-demand test infrastructure, intelligent test selection, and unified coverage and quality gates for every team
• Build the service that provisions production-like environments on demand, so every change is proven and dogfooded before customers see it
• Design the AI workflows in the delivery loop — test maintenance, failure triage, and remediation — validated before rollout
• Own the reliability, scalability, and cost-efficiency of the platform in production
• Continuously improve our engineering processes, tests, and systems that allow us to scale the code base and productivity of the team
• Provide considerate and timely review of your peers' pull requests and design proposals

Some of the things we look for:

• Passion for software engineering, with an interest in build, delivery, and infrastructure engineering in particular
• Experience designing, building, and operating distributed backend systems in production
• Experience building for reliability, scalability, and efficiency at scale
• Experience developing software in Java and Typescript
• Cloud infrastructure architecture and orchestration experience
• Experience with infrastructure as code and related tooling such as Pulumi or Terraform
• Interest in applying AI and agentic workflows to engineering problems, with a validate-then-deploy discipline
• Prior experience building CI/CD, merge queues, test infrastructure, or ephemeral environments is a strong plus
• Prior experience in developing for or operating Trino is a plus
• Demonstration of ownership, grit, and bias for action - core values at Starburst
• Ability to Travel: This role will require occasional 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.

Build your career at Starburst

All-Stars have the opportunity and freedom to realize their true potential. By building alongside top talent, we’re empowered to take ownership of our careers and drive meaningful change. Anchored in industry-proven technology and unprecedented success, All-Stars are taking on the challenge everyday to disrupt our industry –  and the future. 

Our global workforce is supported by a competitive Total Rewards program that reflects our commitment to a rewarding and supportive work environment. This includes a variety of benefits like competitive pay, attractive stock grants, flexible paid time off, and more. 

We are committed to fostering an intentional, inclusive, and diverse culture that drives deep engagement, authentic belonging, and an exceptional All-Star experience. We believe that diversity of thought, perspective, background and experience will enable us to own what we do, drive our success and empower our All-Stars to show up authentically.

Starburst provides equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants for employment and prohibits discrimination and harassment of any type without regard to race, color, religion, age, sex, national origin, disability status, genetics, protected veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state
 or local laws.