Senior Staff Software Engineer, Data Governance & Metadata Systems

Marqeta

6d•$200,500 - $275,000•Remote

About The Position

Marqeta processes hundreds of billions of dollars in payments a year, in a highly regulated card-issuing environment. Data provenance, quality, and access control are foundational to meeting our regulatory obligations and the needs of critical business functions, and we treat them as engineering problems. We are hiring the engineer who will design and lead implementation of the data governance platform, with contracts, compliance requirements, and quality standards enforced in CI and in the write path. You will be its technical lead. The role sits within the Data and ML team, which owns the data lake, the analytics platform, and our ML platform. You will work alongside the leads who define governance policy and enterprise data models, translating what they need into what the platform can enforce and telling them what it will cost. You will set technical direction across the platform team and partner with TPMs and engineering managers on planning and prioritization. We work Flexible First. This role can be performed remotely within the United States. We’d love for you to join us!

Requirements

Built a control plane or policy engine that applies authoritative governance decisions across an organization rather than leaving each team to re-implement them, and operated it in production.
Ability to explain the impact of a failed check on downstream consumers and backfills, having designed such behavior in CI and the write path.
Experience treating engineers and stewards as customers, and driving adoption of a platform that constrained them without direct authority.
Experience deciding what to build, extend, and buy on a platform with a multi-year arc, and ability to discuss past decisions.
Experience building controls that generate their own evidence, rather than stitching evidence together post-hoc.
Deep proficiency in Python.
Proficiency in Java.
Fluency in infrastructure as code.
8+ years in backend or infrastructure engineering, including substantial recent work on metadata, data quality, governance, or developer platforms.

Nice To Haves

Experience extending a metadata platform in production, whether custom plugins, APIs, or model changes (e.g., DataHub Cloud).
Experience working with column-level lineage at scale, with OpenLineage or otherwise.
Experience working with Iceberg, Snowflake, Airflow, Kafka, Flink, Spark, or Kubernetes in production.
Experience working in regulated environments (e.g., SOX, PCI-DSS).
Experience working in payments or card issuing.

Responsibilities

Design and lead implementation of the data governance platform, with contracts, compliance requirements, and quality standards enforced in CI and in the write path.
Serve as the technical lead for the data governance platform.
Work alongside leads who define governance policy and enterprise data models, translating their needs into platform capabilities and assessing costs.
Set technical direction across the platform team and partner with TPMs and engineering managers on planning and prioritization.
Build the data asset registry and its control plane, with the data catalog as the primary interface for asset state, ownership, and metadata enrichment.
Develop the contract model, including libraries and CI modules for automatic checking of contracts, compliance rules, and breaking changes.
Create the emission framework for lakehouse and warehouse pipelines to capture lineage, freshness, and completeness.
Establish the data quality framework, defining where checks run, what failures block, and the limits of steward-defined rules.
Implement impact analysis over the lineage graph to support regulatory requests like deletion, purpose limitation, and subject access.
Develop tooling for data stewards to curate at volume and manage remediation, including campaign instrumentation for visibility into coverage and blockers.
Automate compliance processes, including retention and residency controls, evidence generation, and contract-driven access controls in partnership with the security team.

Benefits

Multiple health insurance options
Flexible time off
Retirement savings program with company contribution and after tax contributions
Equity in a publicly-traded company
Employee Stock Purchase Program
Family-forming benefits
Fertility support
Generous parental leave base salary top-up
Free therapy sessions
Financial coaching
Professional coaching
Legal advice
Monthly stipend to support remote work model
Annual “development dollars”