Key skills
Data platform developmentLakehouse technologiesApache IcebergDelta LakeAmazon S3AWS GlueAWS EMRApache SparkApache AirflowApache KafkaChange Data CapturePythonGoJavaIAM for multi-tenant data accessPCI-DSSSOXSOC 2Technical influenceMentoring/Growing engineersMLSparkKafkaAirflowAWSS3IAMGlueRisk Management
About this role
Marqeta is on a mission to change the way money moves, and they are seeking a Senior Staff Software Engineer for their Data Platform team. This role involves building and operating the data platform infrastructure and SDKs, ensuring that the platform meets the needs of the broader data and ML organization.
Responsibilities:
- Building out the lakehouse — the patterns Marqeta will run on for years
- Evolving and hardening the platform that's already in production
- Improving reliability, performance, and developer experience
Requirements:
- A career building data platforms, not just pipelines. You can name the abstractions you've designed, the teams that adopted them, and the problems they solved. If most of your last several years has been writing transformations rather than building the system transformations run on, this isn't the right shape
- Production depth in modern lakehouse work. Iceberg or Delta in production. Strong fluency in the surrounding stack: AWS data services (S3, Glue, EMR), Spark, Airflow, Kafka, IAM boundaries for multi-tenant data access. You don't need depth in all of it — you need real depth in the lakehouse and credible engagement with the rest
- Mastery of Python in a production data-platform context, with credible depth in Go or Java. Idioms, ecosystem, performance characteristics, the parts that bite at scale. The ability to adopt the best tool for the job
- A track record of evolving live infrastructure. Improving reliability, performance, and DX on systems that real teams depend on, sequenced so the work doesn't disrupt them
- Ownership of major platform transitions. Build vs. buy, migration design, risk management, all the way through to delivery. You've led at least one of these end-to-end and can talk through what went right, what didn't, and what you'd do differently
- Influence as a working skill. You build alignment across platform, security, and consumer teams. You write design docs and RFCs people actually read. You can hold a strong technical position and update on evidence
- A history of growing other engineers — including peers at your level. The team gets stronger because you're on it
- Participation in a rotational on-call pager duty is a required part of the software engineering role
- Helpful, not required: payments or fintech context (PCI-DSS, SOX, SOC 2)
- CDC tooling experience (Debezium, Kafka Connect)
- Data governance tooling (DataHub, Amundsen, Collibra)
- Public technical writing or open-source contributions to data infrastructure