Principal Software Engineer

Job Description

Position Summary

The payment industry is innovating faster than ever, and the trend will continue thanks to extreme demands from everywhere in the world and incredible technological advancements. Big data and Machine Learning (ML)/AI technology are critical to this success. Marqeta created the world's first modern card-issuing platform that empowers innovators to change the world. With this API-based platform, Marqeta partners/customers can instantly issue cards of all types and process payments in real time. To make the Marqeta platform and ecosystem serve customers well and continue to grow, the Data team is responsible for developing Big Data-related technology/services and value-added data products. These include large-scale, reliable, and secure data platforms in the cloud for data acquisition, processing, enriching, serving, consumption, and governance. Our payment data is one of the most valuable assets for Marqeta and our customers. Therefore, we invest in ML/AI, other data processing, analytics technology, and products to derive deep insights and values from data to empower Marqeta internal teams and external customers to grow faster and more effectively.

We are looking for a very strong, hands-on, and experienced technical engineer to lead the development of our Data Lakehouse architecture with the Data Platform as a Service organization. It will include architecture design, implementation, and production of software. This position reports to the Senior Director of Data.

Suppose you are passionate about big data, large-scale platforms, data processing, enriching, serving technology, and value-added data products in the fast-growing payment space. In that case, this is an ideal opportunity for you to lead, contribute, impact, and further grow your career. As a key player in our Data team, you will have the chance to influence and contribute to our vision, direction, and strategy. In addition, you will be a part of the architecture and develop our data platforms, including ML/AI, and data assets, create value-added data products and find effective ways to empower internal and external partners/customers to generate business values.

Learn more about our Product and Engineering team.

What You’ll Do

• Develop a vision, strategy, and roadmap to meet business objectives with existing or emerging technologies in the big data area as it applies to the Payment Data applications, including data platforms and data products, by partnering with other stakeholders and partners. That includes but is not limited to vision, design, and implementation for a Data Catalog, Data Lake, and Data Processing frameworks as we look to build our Data Lakehouse. This Data Lakehouse will be responsible for the ingestion of streaming and batch data sets, enrichment, and creation of new ML features and datasets. This role will eventually lead to building an ML/AI platform for training and inference and will be deployed to Marqeta's transactional systems.
• You enjoy rolling up your sleeves and coding in Java, Python, Golang, and other programming languages necessary for solving immediate day-to-day work needed to keep operations running, along with building out data frameworks and services for use across the data engineers in the team.
• You will work with team members and partners to analyze technical and business problems for new or existing systems (mainly in the payment data applications space but could be broader). You'll identify opportunities and design ways to build new or make existing systems scalable, reliable, and performant to serve customers well, considering both short-term and long-term needs.
• Join forces with others on implementations, all the way to production deployment and execution.
• Foster learning, innovation, leveraging and building on new technologies, and a solid customer-centric service mindset.
• Apply creative thinking/approach to determine technical solutions that further business goals and align with company strategies. Advocate and practice engineering principles, including Security/Privacy, Quality, Reliability, Usability, Scalability/Performance, Productivity/Efficiency, and Operability.
• Guide and support team members on architecture design, problem diagnostics/solving, and engineering best practices, including automation.
• Demonstrate strong leadership. Build and grow a healthy and highly performant Data team, attract high talents, and provide effective coaching to team members.
• Define success metrics and SLAs and track them toward agreed targets.
• Operational excellence: monitoring & operating production services, including understanding user experience and ensuring happy customers.
• Build strong partnerships with internal stakeholders/partners across the company and external customers.
• Contribute to building Marqeta's technology brand through internal and external initiatives.

What We’re Looking For

• You have a Bachelor's degree in a technical field such as computer science and computer engineering or equivalent years of experience. A higher degree is a bonus.
• Experience demonstrating strong leadership, self-motivation, accountability, and team player.
• You have 15+ years of industry experience in software development in Java, big data, and large-scale data platform areas, including 5+ years of experience leading development teams in the Big Data area.
• 10+ years of hands-on large-scale software development experience.
• You've demonstrated proficiency in Java. Scala is a plus.
• Strong business and technical vision.
• Strong customer-centric mindset, exceptional collaboration, and partnership skills.
• Experience with agile development methodology.
• Strong at identifying problems, solving complex problems with simple solutions
• Excellent at architecture design of large-scale, reliable, and performant systems/platforms.
• Deep expertise and hands-on experience in big data platform technology, especially the commonly used open-source packages, including Spark, Dynamo, Kafka, and Kubernetes. Experience with cloud technology.
• Technical background in big data with a deep understanding of issues in multiple areas such as data management, data analysis, data processing, data serving, query processing, distributed processing, high availability and operational excellence of production systems
• You are a solid technical goal-setter for projects with measurable and actionable success metrics. You also possess substantial knowledge and experience in measuring and monitoring services from a user experience angle.
• Excellent oral, written, and presentation skills. A demonstrated ability to effectively communicate technical and business issues and solutions to multiple organizational levels internally and externally.