(Senior) Software Engineer - Data Core

About the role

Celonis is the trusted platform to industrialize Enterprise AI. At our core is the Celonis Context Model — which combines process data, business knowledge, and intelligence into a living digital twin of the enterprise that AI can actually understand, turning AI's operational blind spots into operational clarity. World's leading companies trust Celonis and its global ecosystem of partners to make their AI agents, people, systems, and processes work together, achieving transformational outcomes. We believe there's a massive opportunity to unlock global productivity and sustainability by giving AI the context to understand how every business process really works. Join our mission to make processes work for people, companies, and the planet.

The Team

Data Core is the storage abstraction layer behind Celonis' data pipelines. It sits between ETL workloads and the backends that run them, such as Databricks, Snowflake, StarRocks, Spark, and PostgreSQL. You will work mainly on three codebases:

- Data Core, a Java / Spring Boot service with gRPC and message-queue APIs.

- sqlglot, where we translate and optimize SQL across dialects.

- StarRocks, the OLAP engine we use as a backend.

What You Will Do

- Implement features and fix bugs in Data Core backend integrations.

- Add and fix sqlglot dialect support: parsing, SQL generation, and transpilation correctness.

- Investigate StarRocks behavior and compatibility issues, and contribute fixes or workarounds.

- Debug slow or incorrect queries by following them from SQL text to query plan to results.

- Write unit and integration tests, especially for SQL translation edge cases.

- Take part in design discussions, write short design docs for your own work, and give and receive code reviews.

- As a Senior: lead small to medium projects end to end and help onboard newer teammates.

What We Are Looking For

- Solid Java, or strong Python with the willingness to work in Java daily.

- Good SQL skills: joins, aggregations, window functions, and an understanding of how queries execute.

- Familiarity with at least one analytical or distributed data system (for example Spark, Snowflake, Databricks, Trino, ClickHouse, or StarRocks).

- Good testing and debugging habits.

- Clear written and spoken communication, and a habit of asking questions early.

Strong Plus

- Exposure to how SQL parsers, ASTs, or query planners work.

- Contributions to open source projects, especially sqlglot or StarRocks.

- Experience with gRPC, message queues, or Kubernetes.

- Some C++ experience.

- Interest in query optimization and database internals.

What Celonis can offer you:

- Pioneer Innovation: Work with the global leader in Process Mining and the Process Intelligence Graph to shape the future of AI-driven business operations.