Senior Staff Software Engineer - Data Platform

Marqeta is on a mission to change the way money moves, and they are seeking a Senior Staff Software Engineer for their Data Platform team. The role involves building and operating the data platform infrastructure, designing new abstractions, and leading technical direction to support the company's data and ML organization.

Responsibilities:

• 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
• 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
• 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
• Building out the lakehouse — the patterns Marqeta will run on for years
• Evolving and hardening the platform that's already in production
• Improving reliability, performance, developer experience — improved without disrupting the teams who depend on it
• Testing confidence, release velocity

Requirements:

• A career building data platforms, not just pipelines
• Production depth in modern lakehouse work
• Mastery of Python in a production data-platform context, with credible depth in Go or Java
• A track record of evolving live infrastructure
• Ownership of major platform transitions
• Influence as a working skill
• A history of growing other engineers
• 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