Staff Software Engineer - Core Platform - Streaming & Storage

StubHub•San Francisco, CA

8h•$300,000 - $350,000•Hybrid

About The Position

StubHub is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to join its Core Platform – Streaming & Storage team. The role owns the technical direction and delivery of foundational streaming, messaging, and storage platforms that support company-wide, P0 workflows. The team’s platforms include message queues, dead-letter queue and retry infrastructure, messaging control planes, key-value databases, distributed caches, blob storage, and search/indexing systems. They support roughly 100 service teams and process 10–30 billion events per day. The team is beginning a major effort to migrate streaming from Azure services, including EventHub and ServiceBus, to an AWS-native, Kafka-compatible platform. The target platform will include schema enforcement, self-service SDKs, and direct streaming and querying of event data from S3. The Staff Software Engineer will lead this work and serve as technical owner across streaming and nonrelational storage, making architecture and vendor decisions, ensuring operational excellence, and mentoring engineers. The position is onsite three days per week and remote two days per week, based in New York, NY; Century City, CA; Aliso Viejo, CA; or San Francisco, CA.

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, including object storage, key-value stores, distributed caches, or search/indexing.
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 platform adoption, including migration guides, tooling, sign-off processes, and developer experience.
Design 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.