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