Staff Data engineer

Description

The company's global advertising technology and marketing technology group builds data and decisioning platforms that run advertising for the company U.S., Sam's Club and international markets.

The platforms connect identity, intent, audiences, campaigns, inventory, bidding, relevance, creative, transactions, attribution and measurement at very large scale.

They support sponsored products, display, connected TV, offsite, social and in-store advertising, plus reporting, targeting, optimization, forecasting, recommendations and analytics.

The systems process billions of events and tens of billions of bids each day.

The work emphasizes low latency, correct results, resilience, privacy, scale, tenant isolation and cost control.

The group is extending AI and agentic advertising on governed, reusable data foundations for advertisers, customers and internal teams.

Primary location is 1275 Crossman Ave, Sunnyvale, CA 94089-1103, United States of America.

Responsibilities

• Design and build high-scale platforms that handle billions of advertising and customer signals across streaming, near-real-time, micro-batch and batch workloads.
• Own complex data domains from problem definition and design through production delivery and ongoing optimization.
• Build reliable systems with predictable latency, throughput, replayability, idempotency, fault recovery and cost efficiency.
• Handle late and duplicate events correctly in high-throughput streaming and near-real-time pipelines.
• Create reusable, tenant-aware frameworks for multiple businesses and markets, with standard schemas, contracts, validation, observability, privacy and deployment patterns.
• Set targets for latency, freshness, completeness, quality and reliability.
• Modernize pipelines that feed reporting, audience activation, measurement, optimization and ML.
• Own major capabilities across advertising events, campaigns, identity, audiences, measurement, reporting, bidding, recommendations, forecasting, CRM and marketing data.
• Tune Spark, Kafka, BigQuery, Dataproc, storage and orchestration for performance and cost.
• Improve data quality, lineage, observability, testing, deployment and incident response.
• Lead domain design reviews and mentor engineers.
• Enable governed agentic workflows for discovery, development, monitoring, troubleshooting, documentation and operations, raising engineering standards and delivery speed across teams and partner groups.

Requirements

• Have designed and operated billion-scale distributed data systems using Spark, Kafka, streaming, orchestration and large-scale batch technologies.
• Have deep expertise in SQL, data modeling, partitioning, performance tuning, incremental processing and compute and storage optimization.
• Have hands-on experience with GCP or an equivalent cloud, including BigQuery, Dataproc, Dataflow, Pub/Sub, GCS and Airflow.
• Be strong in Python and proficient in Java or Scala.
• Know data quality, lineage, observability, CI/CD, testing, reliability and incident management.
• Have 3 years' experience in data engineering, database engineering, business intelligence or business analytics.
• Minimum qualifications, any one of: a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science and 4 years' experience in software engineering or a related field; 6 years' experience in software engineering or a related field; or a Master's degree in Computer Science and 2 years' experience in software engineering or a related field.
• Have Staff-level leadership: domain ownership, cross-team influence, design reviews, mentoring and measurable platform improvements at scale in complex global production environments.
• Preferred, not required: AdTech or MarTech experience.
• Preferred, not required: experience with data engineering, database engineering, business intelligence or business analytics, ETL tools and large cloud datasets.
• Preferred, not required: a Master's degree in Computer Science or a related field and 4 years' experience in software engineering or a related field.
• Preferred, not required: knowledge of WCAG 2.2 AA, assistive technologies and accessibility best practices in digital products.

Conditions

Annual base salary range is $143,000.00 to $286,000.00.

Annual or quarterly performance bonuses are offered, and some positions may also include stock.

Paid time off includes PTO, which can be used for vacation, sick leave, holidays or other purposes; the amount depends on job classification and length of employment and meets or exceeds paid sick leave laws where they apply.

Eligibility for some benefits depends on job classification and length of employment, and benefits may be subject to plan or program terms and change over time.

The company and its subsidiaries maintain a drug-free workplace with a zero-tolerance policy on illegal drugs and alcohol.

Equal opportunity is supported through an inclusive culture and accessibility standards.

Benefits

• Competitive pay with performance-based bonus awards.
• Health coverage: medical, vision and dental.
• Financial benefits: 401(k), stock purchase and company-paid life insurance.
• Paid leave: PTO including sick leave, parental leave, family care leave, bereavement, jury duty and voting.
• Other benefits: short-term and long-term disability, company discounts, Military Leave Pay, and adoption and surrogacy expense reimbursement.
• Live Better U education program, paid in full by the company for full-time and part-time associates in the company and Sam's Club facilities, covering high school completion through bachelor's degrees, English Language Learning and short certificates, including tuition, books and fees.