Senior Staff Software Engineer - Data Platform
Job description
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.
What you'd own
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.
How the team works
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.
What "hands-on" actually means here
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.
What the work looks like
- Modernization. Building out the lakehouse — the patterns Marqeta will run on for years. New abstractions, new tooling, the paved road internal teams want to use.
- Live system work. Evolving and hardening the platform that's already in production. Reliability, performance, developer experience — improved without disrupting the teams who depend on it.
- Engineering excellence. Testing confidence, release velocity. On call, blameless postmortems.
What you bring
We care more about demonstrated work than years on paper, but the experience this role asks for typically takes around a decade to accumulate.
- 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.
- 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.
Typical Process
- Application Submission
- Recruiter Video Call
- Coding Interview & Hiring Manager Interview
- Virtual "Onsite" consisting of four 45-60 min video calls
- Offer!
Compensation and Benefits
Marqeta is a Flex First company which allows you to choose your best working environment, whether that be from home or at a company office. To support Flex First, we calibrate pay to a competitive value according to working location. Compensation is aligned according to three tiers within the United States:
- National: A baseline tier that applies to most of the geographic territory of the United States.
- Premium: Slightly elevated from the National tier, and oriented toward a narrower set of higher cost-of-living areas, such as Los Angeles CA and Seattle WA
- Premium Plus: A tier for the most expensive working areas, like the San Francisco Bay area and New York City.
Visit this page or consult with a Recruiter to determine which tier would be applicable to you.
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.
Equal Employment Opportunity, Accommodations and Privacy
Marqeta is an equal opportunity employer committed to an inclusive workplace that fosters belonging. We do not discriminate based on race, color, religion, sex (including pregnancy, lactation, childbirth, or related medical conditions), veteran status or uniformed service member status, age, national origin or ancestry, citizenship or immigration status, physical or mental disability, gender identity, gender expression, sexual orientation, genetic information (including testing or characteristics) or any other characteristic protected by applicable law. We also consider qualified applicants with criminal histories, consistent with legal requirements.
Marqeta endeavors to make reasonable accommodations for applicants with disabilities. If you are an individual with a disability and require a reasonable accommodation to submit this application, complete any pre-employment testing, or otherwise participate in the employee selection process, please submit this form with your specific accommodation request.
Personal data that is provided as part of the application and recruitment process is processed in accordance with the Applicant Privacy Notice. Additional information for California residents can be found here.