Senior Rules Engine and Workflow Engineer

Job Summary

We are seeking a Senior Rules Engine & Workflow Engineer to design, develop, and operate high-volume, production-grade decisioning and workflow systems. The ideal candidate will have strong experience with Drools and rules-engine design patterns, durable workflow orchestration using Temporal or comparable platforms, and state-machine/lifecycle-driven architectures.

This role requires an engineer who can work independently across architecture components, build highly reliable automated decision systems, and ensure that business rules and workflows are traceable, auditable, compliant, and production-ready. Experience with KIE Server is a strong plus.

Key Responsibilities

• Design, develop, and maintain enterprise-grade business rules engines and decisioning services using Drools or comparable rules-engine technologies.
• Apply proven rules-engine design patterns, including rule organization, prioritization, conflict resolution, decision tables, rule versioning, and maintainability strategies.
• Build and operate durable, fault-tolerant workflows using Temporal or comparable workflow/orchestration platforms.
• Design state machines and lifecycle-driven systems capable of handling high transaction volumes and complex business processes.
• Develop scalable services that coordinate business rules, workflows, APIs, databases, and downstream systems.
• Implement workflow resiliency patterns including retries, timeouts, idempotency, compensation, failure recovery, and long-running process management.
• Design systems with strong auditability, traceability, observability, and compliance controls.
• Ensure automated decisions can be explained, reproduced, reviewed, and audited through appropriate logging and decision history.
• Collaborate with architects, product managers, business stakeholders, and engineering teams to translate complex business requirements into scalable technical solutions.
• Independently troubleshoot production issues and make architecture-level decisions with minimal hand-holding.
• Use Claude or comparable AI coding assistants as part of day-to-day software development, debugging, code review, documentation, testing, and productivity workflows.
• Contribute to technical design, code reviews, automated testing, deployment, monitoring, and production support.
• Identify opportunities to improve reliability, scalability, performance, and maintainability of decisioning and workflow platforms.

Required Skills & Experience

• Strong hands-on experience with Drools or a comparable enterprise rules engine.
• Strong understanding of rules-engine architecture and design patterns.
• Experience designing and implementing state machines, state transitions, and lifecycle-driven applications.
• Hands-on experience with Temporal, Cadence, or another durable workflow/orchestration platform.
• Experience building and operating high-volume production workflows.
• Strong understanding of distributed systems, asynchronous processing, event-driven architecture, and service orchestration.
• Experience developing production-grade applications and APIs using a modern programming language such as Java, Kotlin, Python, or similar.
• Strong understanding of workflow reliability patterns such as idempotency, retries, timeouts, compensation, persistence, and failure recovery.
• Practical, day-to-day experience using Claude, GitHub Copilot, Cursor, or comparable AI coding assistants.
• Ability to independently work across multiple architecture components and solve complex technical problems.
• Strong focus on compliance, auditability, observability, and traceability in automated decision systems.
• Experience with automated testing, CI/CD, Git, monitoring, logging, and production support.

Preferred / Nice-to-Have Skills

• KIE Server / Red Hat Process Automation Manager
• KIE Workbench / Business Central
• Drools Decision Tables
• DMN and BPMN
• Temporal SDKs and Workers
• Kafka or other event-streaming platforms
• REST APIs and microservices
• Docker and Kubernetes
• Cloud platforms such as AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud Platform
• PostgreSQL, Oracle, or other relational databases
• OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, or similar observability platforms
• Experience in regulated industries such as financial services, healthcare, insurance, or government

Ideal Candidate

The ideal candidate is a hands-on senior engineer/architect who understands both business decisioning and durable workflow orchestration. They should be comfortable moving between rules, state machines, workflows, APIs, infrastructure, and production troubleshooting without requiring extensive guidance.

They should also understand that automated decision systems must not only be fast and reliable, but also explainable, reproducible, traceable, and audit-ready