Software Engineer, Data

Keycard Labs

6d•Remote

About The Position

We're hiring a Staff Data Engineer to design and build the operational data systems that power Keycard — the pipelines, storage layers, and APIs that drive near real-time enforcement, feedback loops, and customer insights. At Keycard, data isn't exhaust — it's core to the product. The systems you build will serve both the transactional needs of our core identity services and the OLAP requirements that help organizations understand and improve their security posture. You'll balance streaming and batch paradigms — knowing when low-latency streaming is essential and when batch provides clarity and power. Your work will span from integrating external data sources to enabling policy evaluation to surfacing insights in dashboards and APIs. You'll work directly with founders, product, and the engineers building our core services and SDKs. You'll have deep autonomy, accountability to deliver, and the chance to shape the data architecture of a category-defining company from the ground up.

Requirements

Strong experience designing resilient pipelines that balance streaming and batch paradigms.
Experience building systems that satisfy both transactional and analytical requirements.
Fluent in Python, Go, and/or Rust.
Experience building with Kafka, Parquet, and Iceberg.
Think like a builder, not an operator.
Excited to design APIs, pipelines, and storage systems end to end.
Thrive in 0→1 environments.
Make hard trade-offs to deliver today while laying groundwork for the long-term system.
Use iteration to accelerate the learning loop.
Lead by example — raising the bar for technical excellence while helping those around you grow.
Communicate clearly through written plans and async updates, and know when to jump on a call.

Nice To Haves

Experience designing and shipping developer-facing APIs, SDKs, or tools that expose data systems in ergonomic and powerful ways.
Contributions to open source data infrastructure projects (Kafka, Flink, Iceberg) or experience building libraries used by other developers.
Active experimentation with agents in your own workflows (Claude Code, Cursor, MCP) and opinions on how to make data systems agent-friendly.
Strong opinions about the intersection of data, identity, and agents — and excitement about shaping that future at Keycard.

Responsibilities

Design and build the operational data systems that power Keycard.
Develop pipelines, storage layers, and APIs that drive near real-time enforcement, feedback loops, and customer insights.
Balance streaming and batch paradigms, understanding when each is essential.
Integrate external data sources.
Enable policy evaluation.
Surface insights in dashboards and APIs.
Work directly with founders, product, and core service engineers.
Shape the data architecture of the company.