[Hiring] Senior Staff Software Engineer, Data Governance & Metadata Systems @Marqeta

Role Description

Marqeta processes hundreds of billions of dollars in payments a year, in a highly regulated card-issuing environment. Data provenance, quality, and access control are foundational to meeting our regulatory obligations and the needs of critical business functions, and we treat them as engineering problems. We are hiring the engineer who will design and lead implementation of the data governance platform, with contracts, compliance requirements, and quality standards enforced in CI and in the write path.

You will be its technical lead. The role sits within the Data and ML team, which owns the data lake, the analytics platform, and our ML platform. You will work alongside the leads who define governance policy and enterprise data models, translating what they need into what the platform can enforce and telling them what it will cost. You will set technical direction across the platform team and partner with TPMs and engineering managers on planning and prioritization.

We work Flexible First. This role can be performed remotely within the United States. We’d love for you to join us!

What You'll Build

• The data asset registry, and the control plane that grows around it, with the data catalog as its primary interface: the source of truth for asset state, ownership, and metadata enrichment.
• The contract model, and the libraries and CI modules other teams consume so contracts, compliance rules, and breaking changes are checked automatically.
• The emission framework that lakehouse and warehouse pipelines instrument against, and the work of getting those pipelines onto it, so lineage, freshness, and completeness are captured rather than assembled by hand.
• The data quality framework: where checks run, what a failure blocks, and the limits of what stewards can express in a rule.
• Impact analysis over the lineage graph that supports regulatory requests like deletion, purpose limitation, and subject access.
• Tooling data stewards use to curate at volume and work remediation, plus campaign instrumentation so coverage and blockers stay visible.
• Compliance automation: retention and residency controls, evidence that those controls operated, and contract-driven access controls built with our security team, who own PII classification.

Qualifications

• You have built a control plane or policy engine that applies authoritative governance decisions across an organization rather than leaving each team to re-implement them, and you operated it in production.
• You can explain what a failed check does to downstream consumers and backfills, because you have had to design that behavior in CI and in the write path.
• You treat the engineers and stewards who use your platform as customers, and you have driven adoption of something that constrained them without authority over them.
• You have decided what to build, extend, and buy on a platform with a multi-year arc, and can walk through a call you got wrong.
• You have built controls that generate their own evidence, rather than stitching evidence together for auditors after the fact.
• Deep in Python, proficient in Java, and fluent in infrastructure as code.
• 8+ years in backend or infrastructure engineering, including substantial recent work on metadata, data quality, governance, or developer platforms.

Nice-To-Haves

• Experience extending a metadata platform in production, whether custom plugins, APIs, or model changes. We run DataHub Cloud.
• Experience working with column-level lineage at scale, with OpenLineage or otherwise.
• Experience working with Iceberg, Snowflake, Airflow, Kafka, Flink, Spark, or Kubernetes in production.
• Experience working in regulated environments (e.g., SOX, PCI-DSS).
• Experience working in payments or card issuing.

Compensation and Benefits

Marqeta calibrates 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.

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 full-time 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.

• 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 generous parental leave base salary top-up
• 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

Company Description

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.