Senior Staff Software Engineer Data Platform

Senior Full-Stack Software Engineer, Data Platform

About

Marqeta is on a mission to change the way money moves. We are one of the earliest enablers of embedded finance, a market opportunity sized up in the trillions. Our card issuing platform provides unprecedented flexibility and control for companies to issue cards, authorize transactions, and manage payment operations in real time. Marqeta is powering the most well-known brands in the new economy (Block, Cash App, Affirm, Instacart, Doordash, Uber, Walmart, etc). This is the opportunity of a lifetime to work with innovators around the world and unlock equitable financial access for all.

We work Flexible First. This role can be performed remotely anywhere within the United States or from our Oakland office. Participation in a rotational on-call pager duty is a required part of the software engineering role.

Responsibilities

• Building and operating the data platform: the infrastructure, abstractions, and SDKs that the rest of Marqeta’s data and ML organization runs on.
• Owning the lakehouse and the streaming ingestion that feeds it (Iceberg/Delta on S3, Spark/Glue processing, Kafka and CDC pipelines).
• Developing abstractions that allow other teams to land data, build pipelines, and publish datasets without inventing the patterns themselves.
• Setting the multi-year technical direction, designing golden paths, and shipping code directly.
• Modernizing the data platform by building out the lakehouse patterns, new abstractions, and tooling.
• Evolving and hardening the production platform for reliability, performance, and developer experience.
• Ensuring engineering excellence through testing confidence, release velocity, on-call participation, and blameless postmortems.

Requirements

• A career building data platforms, not just pipelines, with demonstrable experience in designing and implementing platform abstractions.
• Production depth in modern lakehouse work (Iceberg or Delta in production) with strong fluency in surrounding stacks like AWS data services (S3, Glue, EMR), Spark, Airflow, Kafka, and IAM boundaries for multi-tenant data access.
• Mastery of Python in a production data-platform context, with credible depth in Go or Java.
• A track record of evolving live infrastructure, improving reliability, performance, and developer experience.
• Ownership of major platform transitions (build vs. buy, migration design, risk management).
• Influence as a working skill, building alignment across platform, security, and consumer teams.
• A history of growing other engineers, including peers at your level.
• Helpful, but 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.