Staff Software Engineer, Data Infrastructure

Patreon is a media and community platform that helps creators build businesses and connect with their fans. The Staff Software Engineer, Data Infrastructure will architect, build, and operate scalable batch and streaming data platforms, self-serve data tooling, and infrastructure that powers product features, analytics, experimentation, and ML systems. The role also involves cross-functional architectural leadership, platform observability, and mentoring engineers.

Responsibilities:

• Architect, build, and operate large scale batch and streaming platforms that directly power Patreon product features, analytics, and experimentation
• Stand up and scale event-driven and streaming systems (Kafka, Kinesis, PubSub, or similar) for real-time data ingestion, transformation, aggregation, and delivery to different data storage systems
• Build self-serve data platforms that let engineers, data scientists, and analysts safely discover data, define contracts, and create and operate pipelines with minimal friction
• Partner with the broader Infrastructure, Platform, and product engineering to drive architectural decisions across storage, compute, deployment, and orchestration to align the data ecosystem with Patreon’s roadmap
• Build the tooling, monitoring, and observability that gives engineers confidence in the data platform's reliability and performance
• Mentor other engineers on infrastructure and streaming best practices, and help shape the long-term data infrastructure roadmap

Requirements:

• 8+ years of software engineering experience, including 4+ years focused on data or platform infrastructure
• Deep, hands-on experience architecting both batch (Airflow, Dagster, or similar) and stream processing systems at scale (Spark, Flink, Kafka Streams, or similar)
• Familiarity with data quality, lineage, observability, and governance tooling
• Strong programming skills in Python (Java, Scala, or Go a plus) and SQL
• Familiarity with cloud infrastructure and broad fluency across data stores: Object storage (S3), RDMS (MySQL, or Postgres, etc.), Key value (DynamoDB), OLAP (Clickhouse, Pinot, or Druid, etc.), search/indexing (Elasticsearch) plus data flow patterns for keeping them in sync with source systems
• Excellent collaboration and communication skills; comfortable driving cross-functional infrastructure decisions
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or a related field, or the equivalent
• Experience with Delta Lake/Iceberg, AWS, or Databricks
• Contributed to open-source streaming or infrastructure tooling
• Experience supporting ML/AI workflows, training pipelines, or evaluation systems