Senior Staff Software Engineer, Data Governance & Metadata Systems

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.

What We're Looking For

• 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.

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

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.

Marqeta cares about your privacy. 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.

To keep our interview process fair and consistent, we ask that all candidates join video interviews with their camera on.

Notice on Use of AI in Recruitment

We may use artificial intelligence (AI) tools in our recruitment processing consistent with the requirements of applicable laws. For more information, review our AI notice here.