Senior Staff Software Engineer - Data Platform

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., * A career building data platforms, not just pipelines. You can name the abstractions you’ve designed, the teams that adopted them, and the problems they solved. If most of your last several years has been writing transformations rather than building the system transformations run on, this isn’t the right shape.

Do you have experience in Public Cloud?, * Production depth in modern lakehouse work. Iceberg or Delta in production. Strong fluency in the surrounding stack: AWS data services (S3, Glue, EMR), Spark, Airflow, Kafka, IAM boundaries for multi-tenant data access. You don’t need depth in all of it - you need real depth in the lakehouse and credible engagement with the rest.

• Mastery of Python in a production data-platform context, with credible depth in Go or Java. Idioms, ecosystem, performance characteristics, the parts that bite at scale. The ability to adopt the best tool for the job.
• A track record of evolving live infrastructure. Improving reliability, performance, and DX on systems that real teams depend on, sequenced so the work doesn’t disrupt them.
• Ownership of major platform transitions. Build vs. buy, migration design, risk management, all the way through to delivery. You’ve led at least one of these end-to-end and can talk through what went right, what didn’t, and what you’d do differently.
• Influence as a working skill. You build alignment across platform, security, and consumer teams. You write design docs and RFCs people actually read. You can hold a strong technical position and update on evidence.
• A history of growing other engineers - including peers at your level. The team gets stronger because you’re on it.

Helpful, not required: 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.

3.63.6 out of 5 stars Remote $200,500 - $250,600 a year, Pulled from the full job description

• Employee stock purchase plan
• Parental leave
• Health insurance, 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 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., When determining salaries, we consider several factors including, but not limited to, skills, prior experience, and work location. The new-hire base salary range for this position is:
• National: 200,500 - 250,600
• Premium: 210,200 - 262,800
• Premium Plus: 220,000 - 275,000

We also believe in recognizing the contributions of our people. That’s why we award annual bonuses to eligible employees, rewarding both individual performance and the success of the entire company.

Along with monetary compensation, Marqeta offers

• Multiple health insurance options
• Flexible time off - take what you need
• Retirement savings program with company contribution and after tax contributions
• Equity in a publicly-traded company and an Employee Stock Purchase Program
• Family-forming benefits, fertility support, and up to 20 weeks of Parental Leave
• Free therapy sessions, financial and professional coaching, and legal advice
• Monthly stipend to support our remote work model
• Annual “development dollars” to support our people growth and development
• Through Flex First, the freedom to live and work wherever you and your family thrive

About Marqeta

Marqeta is on a mission to change the way money moves. We’re one of the earliest enablers of embedded finance, a market opportunity sized up in the trillions. Our card issuing platform provides unprecedented flexibility and control for companies to issue cards, authorize transactions, and manage payment operations in real time. Marqeta is powering the most well known brands in the new economy (Block, Cash App, Affirm, Instacart, Doordash, Uber, Walmart, etc). You don’t need to be a Payments expert to join the Marqeta Team, let us help you with that. This is the opportunity of a lifetime to work with innovators around the world and unlock equitable financial access for all.

Marqeta’s Values

• Solve for the Customer: With a deep understanding of our customers’ business and empathy for their needs, we deliver products and services that drive their success. Earning and keeping their trust guides everything we do.

• Do What’s Right: Knowing businesses and livelihoods depend on us, we pursue solutions that disrupt responsibly and deliver high-quality results that our customers count on. We own our work from start to finish.

• Simplify and Innovate: We approach challenges with curiosity and take smart risks. Innovation comes from finding better, simpler ways to achieve extraordinary outcomes.

• Win as a Team: We succeed together by embracing diverse perspectives and pushing each other to raise the bar. We lead with humility and set aside hierarchy to work as a team.

• Make it Count: We drive forward with focus and agility. With a sense of urgency and purpose, we get the job done, and done right.

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.