Software Engineer, Data

Keycard is building identity and access infrastructure for the agent-native era. They are seeking a Staff Data Engineer to design and build operational data systems, focusing on pipelines, storage layers, and APIs that drive near real-time enforcement and customer insights.

Responsibilities:

• Design and build the operational data systems that power Keycard
• Build the pipelines, storage layers, and APIs that drive near real-time enforcement, feedback loops, and customer insights
• Serve both the transactional needs of core identity services and the OLAP requirements that help organizations understand and improve their security posture
• Balance streaming and batch paradigms
• Integrate external data sources
• Enable policy evaluation
• Surface insights in dashboards and APIs
• Work directly with founders, product, and engineers building core services and SDKs
• Have deep autonomy and accountability to deliver
• Shape the data architecture of a category-defining company from the ground up

Requirements:

• You have strong experience designing resilient pipelines that balance streaming and batch paradigms
• You know when to use streaming for low-latency enforcement and when batch provides clarity and power
• You've built systems that satisfy both transactional and analytical requirements
• You're a programmer at heart — fluent in Python, Go, and/or Rust
• You have experience building with Kafka, Parquet, and Iceberg
• You think like a builder, not an operator, and you're excited to design APIs, pipelines, and storage systems end to end
• You thrive in 0→1 environments
• You make hard trade-offs to deliver today while laying groundwork for the long-term system
• You use iteration to accelerate the learning loop
• You lead by example — raising the bar for technical excellence while helping those around you grow
• You communicate clearly through written plans and async updates
• You know when to jump on a call
• Experience designing and shipping developer-facing APIs, SDKs, or tools that expose data systems in ergonomic and powerful ways
• Contributions to open source data infrastructure projects (Kafka, Flink, Iceberg) or experience building libraries used by other developers
• Active experimentation with agents in your own workflows (Claude Code, Cursor, MCP) and opinions on how to make data systems agent-friendly
• Strong opinions about the intersection of data, identity, and agents — and excitement about shaping that future at Keycard