Senior Staff Software Engineer, Data Governance & Metadata Systems

Marqeta is an embedded finance and card issuing platform company that enables businesses to issue cards, authorize transactions, and manage payment operations in real time. The Senior Staff Software Engineer will lead the design and implementation of a data governance platform, setting technical direction and building systems for metadata, data contracts, quality, lineage, impact analysis, and compliance automation.

Responsibilities:

• The data asset registry, and the control plane that grows around it, with the data catalog as its primary interface: the source of truth for asset state, ownership, and metadata enrichment
• The contract model, and the libraries and CI modules other teams consume so contracts, compliance rules, and breaking changes are checked automatically
• The emission framework that lakehouse and warehouse pipelines instrument against, and the work of getting those pipelines onto it, so lineage, freshness, and completeness are captured rather than assembled by hand
• The data quality framework: where checks run, what a failure blocks, and the limits of what stewards can express in a rule
• Impact analysis over the lineage graph that supports regulatory requests like deletion, purpose limitation, and subject access
• Tooling data stewards use to curate at volume and work remediation, plus campaign instrumentation so coverage and blockers stay visible
• Compliance automation: retention and residency controls, evidence that those controls operated, and contract-driven access controls built with our security team, who own PII classification

Requirements:

• You have built a control plane or policy engine that applies authoritative governance decisions across an organization rather than leaving each team to re-implement them, and you operated it in production
• You can explain what a failed check does to downstream consumers and backfills, because you have had to design that behavior in CI and in the write path
• You treat the engineers and stewards who use your platform as customers, and you have driven adoption of something that constrained them without authority over them
• You have decided what to build, extend, and buy on a platform with a multi-year arc, and can walk through a call you got wrong
• You have built controls that generate their own evidence, rather than stitching evidence together for auditors after the fact
• Deep in Python, proficient in Java, and fluent in infrastructure as code
• 8+ years in backend or infrastructure engineering, including substantial recent work on metadata, data quality, governance, or developer platforms
• Experience extending a metadata platform in production, whether custom plugins, APIs, or model changes. We run DataHub Cloud
• Experience working with column-level lineage at scale, with OpenLineage or otherwise
• Experience working with Iceberg, Snowflake, Airflow, Kafka, Flink, Spark, or Kubernetes in production
• Experience working in regulated environments (e.g., SOX, PCI-DSS)
• Experience working in payments or card issuing