Guide
In the picturesque town near Aachen, Germany, Lena Schöngburg is not just rebuilding a 100-year-old house, but also making strides in the tech industry. After a year and a half of work, she and her partner are getting closer to moving in. But when she's not hammering nails or painting walls, Lena is tackling a different kind of challenge: solving complex problems as a member of Camunda's Distributed Systems & Performance team.
Camunda, a renowned company based in Berlin, specialises in developing products that automate business processes. The work might not be for everyone, but for engineers who think in systems, get excited by hard problems, and care deeply about building tools that other developers love to use, it could be the perfect fit.
Lena's journey with Camunda began when a recruiter noticed her interest in distributed systems. After some time, she joined the team, bringing her expertise to the table.
Lena's career path is as intriguing as her home renovation project. She started as a software engineer in a small company doing natural language processing. However, it was her discovery of the programming language Clojure and its community that truly shaped her as an engineer.
At Camunda, Lena faces several key challenges. The platform must manage distributed systems at scale, support long-running workflows, ensure robust event-driven architecture, and scale across multiple cloud environments. These challenges require deep expertise in various areas, including distributed system design, data replication, fault tolerance, cloud-native development, AI integration, and real-time process orchestration.
Lena's current project involves dynamic scaling, where she works on scaling the numbers of nodes and partitions in a distributed system. She finds excitement in the challenge of creating systems that "just work" and become invisible, despite the inherent chaos involved in software development, particularly in distributed systems.
Lena values good observability in distributed systems, using deterministic property tests and simulations for debugging. When everything else fails, she turns to a pen, paper, and a long walk.
For those interested in joining Lena at Camunda, the company is looking for engineers who share her qualities and are interested in open roles at the company. The "Meet a Camundi" series spotlights the engineers behind the platform, providing insights into their problem-solving, system design, and debugging processes.
In the "Meet a Camundi" series, Lena recommends learning more about the Java Memory Model, especially as it relates to concurrent programming. She also advises new team members to imagine being their own user and find simple and elegant solutions.
[1] Camunda's Whitepaper on Distributed Systems and Performance: https://camunda.com/resources/whitepapers/distributed-systems-and-performance/ [2] Camunda's Whitepaper on Long-Running Workflows: https://camunda.com/resources/whitepapers/long-running-workflows/ [3] Camunda's Whitepaper on Event-Driven Process Automation: https://camunda.com/resources/whitepapers/event-driven-process-automation/ [4] Camunda's Whitepaper on Hybrid Orchestration: https://camunda.com/resources/whitepapers/hybrid-orchestration/ [5] Camunda's Whitepaper on Scaling Across Multiple Cloud Environments: https://camunda.com/resources/whitepapers/scaling-across-multiple-cloud-environments/
- Lena Schöngburg, a member of Camunda's Distributed Systems & Performance team, is not only rebuilding a 100-year-old house but also making strides in the tech industry, specializing in products that automate business processes.
- For those intrigued by the challenges Lena faces in her work at Camunda, the company offers open roles for engineers who share her qualities and are interested in problem-solving, system design, and debugging, as illustrated in the "Meet a Camundi" series.
