Principal Software Engineer

Marqeta provides a card issuing and payment processing platform that enables companies to issue cards, authorize transactions, and manage payment operations in real time. The Principal Software Engineer will lead high-impact technical projects across the Core Issuing & Processing team, own the core platform roadmap, optimize processing systems, and drive engineering and operational excellence.

Responsibilities:

• Own the technical roadmap and author system designs that enable scalable, secure, and operationally efficient card issuing and payment processing products for our customers
• Spend significant time in the codebase – writing, reviewing, and optimizing code across the issuing and processing stack
• Identify and drive high-impact technical initiatives that improve the performance, reliability, and cost-efficiency of our core processing engines
• Collaborate with Product Managers to analyze requirements and provide technical recommendations across onboarding, issuing, digital wallets, authorization & clearing, transaction controls, and ledger
• Mentor and guide technical leads, influence stakeholders, and establish success metrics to drive organization-wide technical excellence
• Apply and evangelize modern best practices in your software designs and implementations to increase the platform's resiliency and scalability

Requirements:

• 12+ years of hands-on software engineering experience
• Demonstrated passion for software engineering excellence, including design principles, fault tolerance practices, scalability, cost, security & privacy considerations, and test-driven development
• Experience partnering with product teams to ideate and bring innovative solutions to market
• Experience developing and scaling microservices using modern cloud technologies, preferably AWS
• Experience working with high volume / low latency data infrastructures
• Solid understanding of security engineering best practices and demonstrable experience in designing solutions that adhere to those standards
• Passion for non-functional challenges, namely: Scale, Cost, Reliability, Performance, High Availability
• Experience building systems running in multiple regions
• Team-oriented approach – can effectively lead a project, participate as an influential team member, and work cross-functionally with other organizations
• Experience with our tech stack, namely Java, Springboot, Kubernetes, Terraform, Helm, Kafka, JPOS, and AWS services
• Master's degree in Software Engineering
• Experience in payment processing, card issuing, or the payments industry
• Domain experience in authorization, clearing, settlement, tokenization, or ledger systems