Staff Engineer - Data Foundations

Adyen•San Francisco, CA

6d•Onsite

About The Position

Adyen is building a Data Foundations team across San Francisco and Amsterdam to make company data coherent, understandable, and trustworthy for people and AI. This newly formed team sits at the heart of the engineering organization. The Staff Engineer will be one of its technical leaders, architecting data foundations and addressing complex challenges across the company. The role is based in San Francisco and works closely with the Data Foundations lead in Amsterdam. The position offers substantial autonomy in organizing the work week and is based in Adyen’s San Francisco office; Adyen describes itself as an office-first company and does not offer remote-only roles. The Staff Engineer will help establish the team’s mandate, architecture, and standards. They will set the target architecture for shared data models, data contracts, and the semantic layer; work with domain teams to define and assign ownership of core metrics; establish contracts between data producers and consumers; build traceable lineage into the data platform; and guide teams in publishing well-owned data products. The role remains hands-on through prototyping, design reviews, and solving difficult data-stack problems. It also partners with Product, Finance, Compliance, Platform Engineering, and domain leads, while mentoring engineers and raising the bar in design reviews. The annual base salary range is $258,000–$367,000, plus RSUs.

Requirements

10+ years of experience in data engineering or data architecture.
Experience working at Staff scope.
Has set direction for more than one team while remaining hands-on.
Experience designing shared data models, data contracts, or semantic layers used by many teams, and ability to explain and defend trade-offs.
Experience changing what other teams build without direct authority, using data, prototypes, and trust.
Ability to explain complex ideas clearly to engineers, finance professionals, and executives.
Clear writing skills.
Ability to work across time zones with Engineering, Product, Finance, Compliance, and other stakeholders.
Proactive ownership: identifies needed changes and drives them to completion independently.

Responsibilities

Set the target architecture for shared data models, data contracts, and the semantic layer.
Work with domain teams to define core metrics once, establish domain ownership, and name metric variants distinctly.
Establish data contracts between producers and consumers, including owners, versions, and automated checks.
Build data lineage so users can trace figures to their sources.
Guide domain teams in publishing data products with clear owners, schemas, and service levels, while setting the shared standards.
Stay hands-on by building prototypes, reviewing designs, and solving complex data-stack problems.
Partner with Product, Finance, Compliance, Platform Engineering, and domain leads to drive decisions using evidence and working prototypes.
Mentor engineers in Data Foundations and domain teams, support them in developing their own solutions, and raise the standard of design reviews.
Help establish the team’s mandate, architecture, and standards.