Senior Staff Software Engineer - Data Platform

Marqeta

1d • $200,500 - $275,000 • Remote

About The Position

This is a software engineering role on a software engineering team. The team builds and operates the data platform: the infrastructure, abstractions, and SDKs that the rest of Marqeta's data and ML organization runs on. We are not writing pipelines–we are building the platform pipelines run on. If you've spent your career building infrastructure that other engineers depend on; and you know the difference between “software engineering” and "data engineering", read on. We work Flexible First. This role can be performed remotely anywhere within the United States or from our Oakland office. We’d love for you to join us! Learn more about our Product and Engineering team. At Marqeta, participation in a rotational on-call pager duty is a required part of the software engineering role. The specifics of the rotation may vary by team, depending on team size and structure, and will be discussed further during the interview process.

Requirements

• Demonstrated work in building data platforms, not just pipelines.
• Ability to name abstractions designed, the teams that adopted them, and the problems they solved.
• Production depth in modern lakehouse work (Iceberg or Delta in production).
• Strong fluency in the surrounding stack: AWS data services (S3, Glue, EMR), Spark, Airflow, Kafka, IAM boundaries for multi-tenant data access.
• Mastery of Python in a production data-platform context.
• Credible depth in Go or Java.
• Ability to adopt the best tool for the job.
• A track record of evolving live infrastructure.
• Experience leading at least one major platform transition end-to-end.
• Influence as a working skill.
• A history of growing other engineers — including peers at your level.

Nice To Haves

• Payments or fintech context (PCI-DSS, SOX, SOC 2).
• CDC tooling experience (Debezium, Kafka Connect).
• Data governance tooling (DataHub, Amundsen, Collibra).
• Public technical writing or open-source contributions to data infrastructure.

Responsibilities

• Building and operating the data platform: the infrastructure, abstractions, and SDKs that the rest of Marqeta's data and ML organization runs on.
• Building the platform pipelines run on.
• Owning the lakehouse and the streaming ingestion that feeds it.
• Setting the multi-year technical direction.
• Designing the golden paths.
• Shipping the work — directly, with your hands on the code that matters.
• Owning technical direction, application architecture, and the engineering bar.
• Writing production code on the platform's hardest problems.
• Owning the design and build of new abstractions end-to-end.
• Leading design reviews.
• Setting the engineering bar through the work itself.
• Prototyping.
• Deep diving on a tricky migration.
• Pairing with engineers on tough problems.
• Building out the lakehouse — the patterns Marqeta will run on for years.
• Creating new abstractions, new tooling, the paved road internal teams want to use.
• Evolving and hardening the platform that's already in production.
• Improving reliability, performance, and developer experience without disrupting the teams who depend on it.
• Ensuring testing confidence and release velocity.
• Participating in on call rotations and blameless postmortems.
• Evolving live infrastructure.
• Improving reliability, performance, and DX on systems that real teams depend on, sequenced so the work doesn't disrupt them.
• Leading major platform transitions, including build vs. buy decisions, migration design, risk management, and delivery.
• Building alignment across platform, security, and consumer teams.
• Writing design docs and RFCs.
• Growing other engineers — including peers at your level.

Benefits

• Multiple health insurance options
• Flexible time off – take what you need
• 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
• Up to 20 weeks of Parental Leave
• Free therapy sessions
• Financial coaching
• Professional coaching
• Legal advice
• Monthly stipend to support our remote work model
• Annual “development dollars” to support our people growth and development
• The freedom to live and work wherever you and your family thrive

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Education Level: No Education Listed