Staff Engineer - Data Foundations

Description

The company provides payments, data and financial products in one platform, serving large global customers.

The Data Foundations team is new and sits at the centre of engineering. It is building the shared base that makes company data work as one thing: how it fits together, what it means, and whether people and AI can trust and use it.

The role is a technical leadership position on the team. You will design data across the company and multiply your impact through the teams and people you work with, winning support with sound design, working prototypes and trust. You will drive decisions when the path is unclear.

The team is based across San Francisco and Amsterdam. You will be based in San Francisco and work closely with the Data Foundations lead in Amsterdam. You have a lot of room to plan your own week.

Responsibilities

• Help write the mandate, architecture and standards for a greenfield effort that is being defined now.
• Set the target architecture for shared data models, data contracts and the semantic layer that every domain builds on.
• Work with domain teams so each core metric has one definition, owned by the domain that produces it. Variants get their own names.
• Make data contracts standard practice between producers and consumers, with named owners, versions and automated checks, so consumers are never caught off guard.
• Build lineage in from the start, so anyone can trace a figure to its source without asking the original pipeline engineer.
• Guide domain teams to publish data products with a clear owner, schema and service level. Domain teams own the products; you own the standard.
• Stay hands-on by building prototypes, reviewing designs and solving hard problems in the data stack.
• Work with Product, Finance, Compliance, Platform Engineering and domain leads, and win debates with data and working prototypes.
• Mentor engineers in Data Foundations and in the domains, help them find solutions with their own ideas, and raise the standard of design reviews.

Requirements

• You have 10+ years of experience in data engineering or data architecture, including work at Staff scope. You have set direction for more than one team and you still write code.
• You choose your own problems, spot what needs to change and see it through to completion without being told.
• You have designed shared data models, data contracts or semantic layers that many teams depend on, and you can justify the trade-offs.
• You have changed what other teams built without formal authority over them, using data, prototypes and trust.
• You explain complex ideas simply to engineers, finance staff and executives, and you write clearly.
• You collaborate well with Engineering, Product, Finance, Compliance and other stakeholders across time zones.
• Annual base salary is $258, $367k, plus RSUs.

Conditions

Based in San Francisco, working closely with the Data Foundations lead in Amsterdam.

Flexible control over how you structure your week.

Benefits

• RSUs are part of the total pay package alongside the base salary.