Staff Software Engineer - Customer Data Platform

PayJoy is a mission-first credit provider dedicated to helping under-served customers in emerging markets achieve financial stability. The Staff Engineer for the Customer Data Platform will design and build systems to create a unified view of customers and enhance messaging strategies, driving revenue and compliance.

Responsibilities:

• Architect and build the systems that create a unified customer profile by resolving fragmented identifiers across systems and managing contact data, consent, and channel preferences at global scale
• Architect high-throughput ingestion pipelines (hundreds of millions of events/day across 11+ markets) that unify behavioral, transactional, and third-party signals into enriched profiles powering ML, segmentation, and activation
• Design and implement the orchestration and rules infrastructure that enforces messaging governance across teams, including frequency caps, suppression, deduplication, and compliance controls across markets
• Lead the technical strategy and execution for consolidating a fragmented messaging vendor ecosystem, designing migration paths and platform abstractions that allow teams to transition without disrupting live operations
• Design and maintain the developer-facing APIs and platform services that enable teams to send messages through a unified communications platform with clear contracts, versioning, and operational reliability
• Build the decisioning systems that dynamically select the optimal messaging channel and vendor based on customer contactability, consent state, deliverability, and cost

Requirements:

• 12+ years of software engineering experience, with at least 3 years as a technical lead or staff-level IC owning mission-critical, large-scale distributed systems
• Deep expertise building Customer Data Platform capabilities from the ground up – identity resolution, event pipelines, unified profile stores, segmentation engines, and activation pipelines
• Strong experience designing real-time and batch data pipelines that ingest, transform, and unify behavioral, transactional, and third-party data at scale (Kafka, Flink, Spark, dbt, or equivalents)
• Proven ability to design developer-facing platform APIs with clear data contracts, versioning, and operational SLAs that enable reliable consumption by multiple internal teams
• Experience with multi-region data architecture and data residency patterns, ideally in markets with active data protection regulations (GDPR, DPDP Act, POPIA, LGPD, or equivalents)
• Demonstrated cross-functional influence: you have driven architectural decisions across Engineering, Product, Data, Marketing, and Compliance without direct authority
• Strong technical communication skills: you can distill complex platform tradeoffs into clear written proposals, ADRs, and technical roadmaps for engineering and executive audiences
• Experience building or operating Customer Data Platforms (CDP) or identity resolution systems using tools such as Segment, RudderStack, mParticle, Adobe Experience Platform, or Salesforce Data Cloud
• Experience working with multi-channel messaging infrastructure and CPaaS providers such as Twilio, Sinch, Infobip, or MessageBird, supporting channels like SMS, WhatsApp, email, and push notifications