MQ

SeniorStaffSoftwareEngineer-DataPlatform

$200–275k Oakland, California, United States; United States Remote Friendly
Market Sentiment
HIGH DEMAND

Neural analysis suggests this role is
optimal for Senior candidates.

The Brief

“Senior Staff Software Engineer - Data Platform at MQ. Skills: Data platform, Lakehouse, Infrastructure, Python. Build and operate the data platform. Build infrastructure”

What You'll Achieve.

Improve reliability; Improve performance; Improve developer experience

Industry & Context.

Problems you'll solve

Root cause analysis; Troubleshooting; Deep diving

Eligibility Requirements

Rotational on-call pager duty, Work from home

What They're Looking For.

Must Have

A career building data platforms, Production depth in modern lakehouse work, Mastery of Python, Credible depth in Go or Java, Track record of evolving live infrastructure, Ownership of major platform transitions, Influence as a working skill, History of growing other engineers

Nice to Have

Payments or fintech context, CDC tooling experience, Data governance tooling experience, Public technical writing, Open-source contributions

What You'll Do.

Build and operate the data platform

Own streaming ingestion

Set technical direction

Write production code

Build out lakehouse patterns

Build new abstractions

Harden production platform

Improve developer experience

Build vs buy analysis

Manage platform transitions

Build alignment across teams

Hold technical position

How You'll Work.

Team & Collaboration

Partner with Manager; Work with senior staff engineers; Partner with security; Partner with compliance; Partner with consumer teams

Communication Scope

Technical writing; Design docs; RFCs

Process & Methodology

Roadmap planning

Full 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 abstrac

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