Senior Software Engineer - VERA Engine & Ecosystem

About the Team:

The Stream Engines & Ecosystem (SEE) team at Ververica owns VERA, an enterprise-grade stream processing engine built on Apache Flink, together with the surrounding ecosystem that makes it production-ready for demanding workloads. Our charter covers the engine runtime itself as well as the components customers rely on to integrate VERA into real-world data platforms: connectors, catalogs, change data capture (CDC), and AI model integration.

Role Overview:

We are looking for a Senior Software Engineer to contribute to the design, implementation, and long-term evolution of the VERA engine and its ecosystem. The primary focus is on engine kernel development, complemented by meaningful work across the broader ecosystem. You will take end-to-end ownership of non-trivial technical problems — from design proposals through implementation, testing, release, and production hardening.

Responsibilities:

• Design and implement features and improvements in the VERA engine kernel, including areas such as runtime execution, state management, checkpointing, scheduling, fault tolerance, and SQL/Table API.
• Contribute to ecosystem components including connectors, catalogs, CDC pipelines, and AI model integration.
• Diagnose and resolve correctness, performance, and stability issues in distributed production environments.
• Produce and review technical design documents; participate in architectural discussions for both kernel and ecosystem initiatives.
• Uphold engineering quality through code review, thorough testing, and rigorous performance and regression analysis.
• Collaborate with adjacent teams across platform, SRE, and product functions.

Requirements

• Strong proficiency in Java, with a solid understanding of the JVM, concurrency, memory model, and performance tuning.
• Working knowledge of distributed systems fundamentals: consensus, replication, consistency models, fault tolerance, and failure recovery.
• Demonstrated ability to reason about and debug complex distributed data systems under production conditions.
• Experience designing and implementing non-trivial systems-level software, with a track record of shipping and maintaining production code.
• Familiarity with stream processing concepts such as event time, watermarks, windowing, exactly-once semantics, and state backends.
• Ability to produce clear design documents and collaborate effectively in an asynchronous, remote environment.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Contributions to Apache Flink or comparable open-source projects in the streaming, messaging, or data infrastructure space (e.g., Kafka, Pulsar, Spark, Iceberg, Paimon).
• Committer or PMC status on a relevant Apache project.
• Hands-on experience with the internals of Flink or a similar distributed stream processing engine.
• Experience building or maintaining connectors, catalog integrations, or CDC pipelines.
• Familiarity with integrating AI/ML model serving or inference into data processing pipelines.
• Experience with storage formats and lakehouse technologies (Parquet, ORC, Iceberg, Hudi, Paimon, Delta Lake).