Senior Software Engineer (FlinkSQL)

Location: Remote, Ehningen, Baden-Wurttemberg, Germany. Some travel may be required based on business demand; on-call participation is required.

Company

hirify.global develops cloud-native data and streaming technologies, with the role delivered through IBM Software and focused on hirify.global Cloud and Apache Flink.

What you will do

• Design and implement improvements to Flink SQL components, including the planner, parser, optimizer, type system, and runtime.
• Own projects from design through implementation, testing, documentation, rollout, operational readiness, and follow-up.
• Improve reliability, maintainability, scalability, performance, observability, automation, and tooling for the cloud-native SQL stack supporting batch and streaming workloads.
• Write design documentation, contribute to technical discussions, reduce technical debt, and improve developer workflows.
• Collaborate with product, engineering, partner, and open-source communities to turn customer needs into technical solutions and contribute to Apache Flink.
• Support other engineers through code reviews, design feedback, knowledge sharing, and mentoring.

Requirements

• Bachelor's Degree required; a Master's Degree is preferred.
• 5–7+ years of industry experience building backend services, data infrastructure, or distributed systems.
• Strong computer science fundamentals in data structures, algorithms, concurrency, and distributed systems.
• Expertise in Java, preferred for this role, or another JVM language such as Scala, with the ability to contribute to a large existing codebase.
• Solid understanding of SQL and relational concepts, with interest in query-engine parsing, planning, optimization, and execution.
• Familiarity with databases, query engines, or stream processors through work experience, open source, or advanced coursework/projects.
• Experience operating services on at least one major public cloud: AWS, GCP, or Azure.
• Willingness to own production code, including metrics, dashboards, alerts, and on-call participation.
• Ability to deliver well-scoped features end to end, communicate pragmatically, participate constructively in design discussions and code reviews, and maintain a high standard of code quality and testing.

Nice to have

• Experience with Apache Flink SQL, the Table API, another SQL engine, or a large-scale data processing system such as Spark SQL, Trino, or a database engine.
• Familiarity with query planners, optimizers, compiler construction, or Apache Calcite.
• Understanding of streaming semantics, including event time, watermarks, and CDC handling.
• Experience with Apache Kafka, Schema Registry, Avro, or Protobuf.
• Contributions to open-source projects in streaming, databases, or distributed systems, ideally Flink-related components.
• Exposure to Kubernetes-based environments.

Culture & Benefits

• Remote work arrangement based in Germany, with some travel required according to business demand.
• Regular on-call responsibilities connected to production ownership.
• Opportunities for continuous learning, career development, experimentation, and feedback.
• Collaborative environment involving engineers, product managers, partner teams, and the broader open-source community.
• Equal-opportunity workplace committed to fair employment practices and inclusion.