Staff Software Engineer - Core Platform - Streaming & Storage

StubHub • San Francisco, CA

1d • Hybrid

About The Position

StubHub is seeking a Staff Software Engineer for its Core Platform – Streaming & Storage team. The role leads the architecture and delivery of foundational streaming, messaging, and storage platforms that support critical workflows across the company. The platforms include message queues, dead-letter queue and retry infrastructure, messaging control planes, key-value databases, distributed caches, blob storage, and search and indexing systems. They support approximately 100 service teams and process 10–30 billion events per day.

The team is beginning a major migration of streaming from Azure services, including EventHub and ServiceBus, to an AWS-native, Kafka-compatible platform. The work includes schema enforcement, self-service SDKs, and direct streaming and querying of event data from S3. The Staff Software Engineer will own technical direction across streaming and nonrelational storage, make architecture and vendor decisions, ensure operational excellence for P0 infrastructure, and mentor the engineers who build and run these platforms.

This is an onsite role with three days in the office and two days remote, based in New York, NY; Century City, CA; Aliso Viejo, CA; or San Francisco, CA. StubHub describes its environment as offering autonomy to lead large-scale experiments and tests, and provides competitive compensation and benefits. The anticipated base salary is $300,000–$350,000 annually, with equity and other benefits as part of total compensation.

Requirements

• At least 8 years of software engineering experience, including several years acting as a technical lead for large-scale distributed systems.
• Deep expertise in event streaming and messaging, including Kafka or Kafka-compatible brokers.
• Proven experience operating production infrastructure at scale, including high availability, incident response, performance tuning, and cost management.
• Experience with cloud data storage and NoSQL systems, such as object storage, key-value stores, distributed caches, and search/indexing.
• A track record of leading multi-quarter, cross-team platform migrations or programs end-to-end.
• Excellent communication skills and ability to align leadership, partner teams, and engineers on technical direction.

Nice To Haves

• Experience with schema registries and compatibility tooling.
• Experience with lakehouse formats such as Iceberg.
• Experience with CDC pipelines.
• Experience with .NET/C# and Python.
• Experience with Kubernetes/EKS, Terraform, or OpenTelemetry.
• Experience mentoring junior engineers.
• Familiarity with Kafka-compatible brokers such as MSK, Confluent, Redpanda, AutoMQ, or WarpStream.

Responsibilities

• Own the technical strategy and architecture for StubHub's streaming platform and NoSQL/storage offerings.
• Lead the migration of streaming from Azure to an AWS-native, Kafka-compatible platform, including vendor selection and benchmarking, broker deployment, schema registry, and producer/consumer SDKs.
• Design and operate high-throughput infrastructure that processes billions of events per day, with reliability and performance appropriate to its company-wide impact.
• Drive engineering excellence through architecture and design reviews, observability, operational readiness, and incident response for P0 systems.
• Partner with approximately 100 service teams on adoption, including migration guides, tooling, sign-off processes, and developer experience.
• Build compliance and governance into the platform, including SOX and GDPR/CCPA requirements, PII handling, retention, and data access controls.
• Mentor and grow a team of 3–5 engineers through design reviews and coaching.
• Shape the team's multi-year roadmap in partnership with engineering.

Benefits

• Unlimited Flex Time Off.
• 401(k).
• Health insurance.
• Vision insurance.
• Dental insurance.
• Equity.
• Paid parental leave.
• Accelerated growth environment with autonomy to lead experiments and tests at massive scale.
• Competitive compensation package.

What This Job Offers

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