Senior Staff Software Engineer – Data Platform

Senior Staff Software Engineer – Data Platform

Company: Marqeta Location: Remote (United States) Work Model: Remote Contract: Permanent Industry: Tech

Marqeta is seeking a Senior Staff Software Engineer to join our Data Platform team. This role is focused on building and operating the core infrastructure, abstractions, and SDKs that power Marqeta's data and Machine Learning organization. We are looking for engineers who specialize in building foundational platforms, not just data pipelines.

About the Role

You will be responsible for the lakehouse and the streaming ingestion that feeds it, including Iceberg/Delta on S3, Spark/Glue processing, Kafka, and Change Data Capture (CDC) pipelines. You will design and implement abstractions that enable other teams to easily land data, build pipelines, and publish datasets without reinventing patterns. This role involves setting the multi-year technical direction, designing golden paths, and directly contributing code to critical platform components.

You will report to the Director of Data Engineering and collaborate with a peer Manager focused on people leadership and operational delivery. You will own the technical direction, application architecture, and engineering standards for the platform. You will also work alongside other senior staff engineers and partner with security, compliance, and consumer teams.

What "Hands-On" Means Here

• Writing production code to solve complex platform challenges.
• Owning the end-to-end design and build of new abstractions.
• Leading design reviews and setting the engineering bar through your work.
• Prototyping, deep diving into migrations, and pairing with engineers on difficult problems.

What the Work Looks Like

• Modernization: Building out the lakehouse and establishing patterns for years to come, creating new abstractions and tooling that internal teams will want to use.
• Live System Evolution: Enhancing and hardening the existing production platform, focusing on reliability, performance, and developer experience without disrupting dependent teams.
• Engineering Excellence: Ensuring testing confidence, improving release velocity, participating in on-call rotations, and conducting blameless postmortems.

Requirements

We value demonstrated experience over years on paper, but this role typically requires around a decade of relevant experience.

• A career focused on building data platforms, not just data pipelines. You should be able to articulate the abstractions you've designed, their adoption, and the problems they solved.
• Production experience with modern lakehouse technologies (Iceberg or Delta).
• Strong familiarity with the surrounding data stack, including AWS data services (S3, Glue, EMR), Spark, Airflow, Kafka, and managing IAM boundaries for multi-tenant data access.
• Mastery of Python in a production data platform context, with credible depth in Go or Java.
• A proven track record of evolving live infrastructure, improving reliability, performance, and developer experience without disruption.
• Experience leading major platform transitions (build vs. buy, migration design, risk management) from start to finish.
• Strong influence and collaboration skills, with experience building alignment across platform, security, and consumer teams.
• A history of mentoring and growing other engineers.

Helpful, but not required:

• Experience in payments or fintech (PCI-DSS, SOX, SOC 2).
• CDC tooling experience (e.g., Debezium, Kafka Connect).
• Familiarity with data governance tools (e.g., DataHub, Amundsen, Collibra).
• Public technical writing or open-source contributions to data infrastructure.

What We Offer

Marqeta is a "Flex First" company, offering the freedom to choose your optimal working environment, whether remote or in an office. Compensation is calibrated to your work location within the United States, with three tiers (National, Premium, Premium Plus) to account for cost of living variations.

Salary Range (Annual):

• National: $200,500 - $250,600
• Premium: $210,200 - $262,800
• Premium Plus: $220,000 - $275,000

Additional Benefits:

• Annual performance-based bonuses.
• Multiple health insurance options.
• Flexible time off.
• Retirement savings program with company contribution.
• Publicly traded company equity and an Employee Stock Purchase Program.
• Family-forming benefits, fertility support, and up to 20 weeks of Parental Leave.
• Access to free therapy, financial and professional coaching, and legal advice.
• Monthly stipend for remote work.
• Annual "development dollars" for professional growth.