Senior Principal Data Engineer

Job Description

Position Summary

The payment industry is innovating at a faster pace than ever before, and the trend will continue thanks to very strong demands from everywhere in the world and amazing technological advancements. Big data and Machine Learning (ML)/AI technology play a critical role in 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. 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 leader to lead the development in the areas mentioned above. These will include architecture design, implementation, and production, in addition to team building. Since we are in a fast-growth mode, at the same time as growing the team, hands-on development work is expected. This position reports to the VP of Data.

If you are passionate about big data, large-scale platforms, ML/AI, data processing, enriching, serving technology, and value-added data products in the fast-growing payment space, this is an ideal opportunity for you to lead, contribute, impact, and further grow your career. As a key leader in the Data team, you will have the opportunity to influence and contribute to our vision, direction, strategy, as well as how we architecture, develop our data platforms including ML/AI, data assets, create value-added data products, and also finding effective ways to empower internal and external partners/customers to generate business values.

What You’ll Do

• Work with team members and partners on analyzing technical and business problems (new or with existing systems) in a broad range (mainly in the big data area but could be broader), identifying opportunities, designing ways to build new systems or make existing systems scalable, reliable, and performant to well serve customers, considering both short term and long term needs. Join forces with others on implementations, all the way to production deployment and execution.
• Develop a vision, strategy, and roadmap to meet business objectives with existing or emerging technologies in the big data area, including data platforms and data products by partnering with other stakeholders and partners.
• Foster learning, innovation, leveraging and building on new technologies, and a strong 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.
• Where needed across the Data team, roll up his or her sleeves and code in Java, Python 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 broad use for all the data engineers in the team.
• 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, provide effective coaching to team members.
• Define success metrics and SLAs, as well as 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 Marqetar’s technology brand through internal and external initiatives.

What We’re Looking For

• Bachelor’s degree in a technical field such as computer science and computer engineering. A higher degree is a bonus.
• Experience demonstrating strong leadership, self-motivation, accountability, and team player.
• 18+ years of industry experience in the big data and/or large-scale data platform areas, including 5+ years of experience managing and leading development teams in the Big Data and Web Technologies areas. Experience in building large-scale ML/AI platforms is a plus.
• 5+ years of hands-on large-scale software development experience.
• Proven record of building and growing strong/productive teams, including attracting high talents. Caring for team members and inspiring/empowering them to deliver outstanding business results.
• Strong business and technical vision.
• Strong customer-centric mindset.
• Experience with agile development methodology.
• Strong at identifying problems, solving complex problems with simple solutions
• Strong at architecture design of large-scale, reliable, and performant systems/platforms.
• Deep expertise and hands-on experience in the areas of 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, statistics, data mining, machine learning, and operational excellence of production systems
• Strong at technical goal setting for a project with measurable and actionable success metrics. Good knowledge and experience in measuring and monitoring service from a user experience angle.
• Exceptional collaboration and partnership skills.
• 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.

Nice to Have

• Experience managing technical products (SaaS platform services, API/SDK products...)
• Past experience building Fintech products or incredible developer experience
• Experience in agile software development methodologies
• Trained Design-Thinker and strategist