Senior Staff Software Engineer - Data Platform

MQ Referrals Only; United States; Hybrid; USD 201,000 - 251,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Monthly remote work stipend

Equity in the company

Retirement savings program

Health insurance options

Flexible time off

Job summary

Marqeta is seeking a senior software engineer to own the lakehouse and streaming ingestion patterns that fuel our data platform. You will design abstractions, lead reviews, and ship end-to-end solutions used by multiple teams.

You will work with security, compliance, and consumer teams to maintain reliability, performance, and developer experience while mentoring engineers and shaping the multi-year technical roadmap.

Qualifications

• Demonstrated work building data platforms, not just pipelines.
• Strong depth in lakehouse production with Iceberg/Delta in production.
• Proficient Python in production data-platform context; Go/Java depth.
• Experience evolving live infrastructure with reliability and DX improvements.
• Ownership of major platform transitions and end-to-end delivery.
• Ability to influence across platform, security, and consumer teams.

Responsibilities

• Own lakehouse and streaming ingestion patterns and set multi-year technical direction.
• Design and ship platform abstractions with end-to-end ownership.
• Collaborate with security, compliance, and consumer teams; lead RFCs and design reviews.
• Mentor peers and grow other engineers on the team.

Skills

Data platform

Lakehouse architecture

Python production

Go/Java proficiency

AWS data services

Spark/Glue

Kafka/C DC pipelines

Design docs/RFCs

Mentoring engineers

Tools

Iceberg/Delta

S3/Glue/EMR

Kafka

Airflow

Debezium/Kafka Connect

DataHub/Amundsen/Collibra

Job description

This is a software engineering role on a software engineering team. The team builds and operates the data platform: the infrastructure, abstractions, and SDKs that the rest of Marqeta's data and ML organization runs on. We are not writing pipelines–we are building the platform pipelines run on.

If you've spent your career building infrastructure that other engineers depend on; and you know the difference between “software engineering” and "data engineering", read on.

We work Flexible First. This role can be performed remotely anywhere within the United States or from our Oakland office. We’d love for you to join us!

Learn more about our Product and Engineering team.

At Marqeta, participation in a rotational on-call pager duty is a required part of the software engineering role. The specifics of the rotation may vary by team, depending on team size and structure, and will be discussed further during the interview process.

What you'd own

The lakehouse and the streaming ingestion that feeds it. Iceberg/Delta on S3, Spark/Glue processing, Kafka and CDC pipelines, the abstractions that let other teams land data, build pipelines, and publish datasets without inventing the patterns themselves. You’d help set the multi-year technical direction, design the golden paths, and ship the work — directly, with your hands on the code that matters.

How the team works

You’d report to the Director of Data Engineering and partner with a peer Manager whose scope is people leadership and operational delivery. You own technical direction, application architecture, and the engineering bar. You’ll work alongside other senior staff engineers across the broader data platform org, and partner with security, compliance, and the consumer teams who depend on what we ship.

What "hands-on" actually means here

Worth being specific, because “hands-on” means different things to different people:

• Yes: writing production code on the platform's hardest problems, owning the design and build of new abstractions end-to-end, leading design reviews, setting the engineering bar through the work itself.
• Sometimes: prototyping, deep diving on a tricky migration, pairing with engineers on tough problems.

What the work looks like

• Modernization. Building out the lakehouse — the patterns Marqeta will run on for years. New abstractions, new tooling, the paved road internal teams want to use.
• Live system work. Evolving and hardening the platform that's already in production. Reliability, performance, developer experience — improved without disrupting the teams who depend on it.
• Engineering excellence. Testing confidence, release velocity. On call, blameless postmortems.

What you bring

We care more about demonstrated work than years on paper, but the experience this role asks for typically takes around a decade to accumulate.

• 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.

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.

Typical Process

• Application Submission
• Recruiter Video Call
• Coding Interview & Hiring Manager Interview
• Virtual "Onsite" consisting of four 45-60 min video calls
• Offer!

Compensation and Benefits

Marqeta is a Flex First company which allows you to choose your best working environment, whether that be from home or at a company office. To support Flex First, we calibrate pay to a competitive value according to working location. Compensation is aligned according to three tiers within the United States:

• National: A baseline tier that applies to most of the geographic territory of the United States.
• Premium: Slightly elevated from the National tier, and oriented toward a narrower set of higher cost-of-living areas, such as Los Angeles CA and Seattle WA
• Premium Plus: A tier for the most expensive working areas, like the San Francisco Bay area and New York City.

Visit this page or consult with a Recruiter to determine which tier would be applicable to you.

When determining salaries, we consider several factors including, but not limited to, skills, prior experience, and work location. The new-hire base salary range for this position is:

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

We also believe in recognizing the contributions of our people. That's why we award annual bonuses to eligible employees, rewarding both individual performance and the success of the entire company.

Along with monetary compensation, Marqeta offers

• Multiple health insurance options
• Flexible time off – take what you need
• Retirement savings program with company contribution and after tax contributions
• Equity in a publicly-traded company and an Employee Stock Purchase Program
• Family-forming benefits, fertility support, and up to 20 weeks of Parental Leave
• Free therapy sessions, financial and professional coaching, and legal advice
• Monthly stipend to support our remote work model
• Annual “development dollars” to support our people growth and development
• Through Flex First, the freedom to live and work wherever you and your family thrive