Principal Software Engineer

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). Today nearly 8 out of 10 Americans use a product powered by Marqeta every week. This is the opportunity of a lifetime to work with innovators around the world and unlock equitable financial access for all.

Marqeta is looking for a talented Principal Software Engineer to contribute and understand at a deep level the current state of technology in our industry, including open source and developments in common platforms. You will own a single project of quantifiable scope and impact  or may oversee and ensure the success of multiple projects simultaneously.  You will identify the broad problems and turn that big picture into projects and work for yourself, your team and/or others in your domain. You will apply a systemic focus including reliability, security, privacy, availability, efficiency and maintainability. You will foster and develop new technical leaders through mentorship, training and exemplification and will create training material for new hires and move towards mentoring mentors to scale your own impact further. 

This role will be performed in Warsaw, Poland. We’d love for you to join us!

What You’ll Do

• Significantly influence the direction of large, cross-functional projects.
• Address ambiguous problems spanning the interactions among multiple complex systems.
• Exhibit a high level of creativity and innovation in approaching difficult technical and/or organizational problems.
• Be the maintainer of something subtle and complicated.
• Own engineering decisions that impact multiple teams.
• Diagnose unexpected behaviors, evaluate proposed changes against both short term needs and long term system goals and health, including maintainability.
• Understand and address customer needs and answer difficult questions. 
• Design for solutions to impactful problems that could span across multiple teams.
• Proactively identify and help refocus efforts when projects are off-course or not technically feasible and results aren’t moving the needle for business/team/org goals or serving the needs of customers in a meaningful way.
• Champion change, and generate excitement for change.
• Define a long-term vision for the team that factors in company-wide priorities as well as the technical limitations and possibilities of Marqeta's software and systems.
• Provide informal and formal technical mentorship.
• Develop relationships with high level peers across the organization, and leverage these relationships to influence.
• Influence the culture and seek to understand and improve things organization wide.
• Design and implement systems that go beyond code. 
• Contribute to the ecosystem of tools that make Marqeta better overall
• Design software components for the entire organization to use over the course of the next 12 months. Designs incorporate organizational and business concerns.
• Influence, understand and define the architectural choices made across the organization.
• Be the captain for mission-critical projects. 
• Take a “less-is-more” approach to the core of engineering design and operating best practices. 
• Actively participate in recruiting. 
• Participate in on-call coverage. 

  What We're Looking For

• 15+ years of related experience with a Bachelor’s degree; or 12 years and a Master’s degree; or a PhD with 8 years experience.  In lieu of a degree, 18+ years of relevant experience may suffice. 
• Demonstrated ability to break projects of high complexity down into smaller pieces to distribute to others, and orchestrate the final assembly and completion.
• Understanding of which levers to pull to drive meaningful results and an understanding of the wider, cross-functional implications of your work. 
• Ability to act thoughtfully and decisively in critical situations even when making challenging or unpopular decisions. 
• Ability to model transparency by articulating the why behind decisions in clear documented form.
• Ability to demonstrate Trust, Velocity, and Scalability in implementations and holistically consider capacity planning, testing, release planning, and all other aspects of project rollout. 
• Ability to make code contributions that are of exemplary quality and become reusable components for the whole product area. Code is built (tested, integrated) once, works/scales sustainably, and is clean and easy to extend.
• Understanding and effective in multiple languages based on the problem space (application code in more than one area, infrastructure-as-code, scripting, etc)
• Ability to review and approve designs in a broad spectrum of related areas with high quality feedback ensuring quality for cross-team cross-module design issues. 
• Understanding of  the end-to-end picture in which organizations develop applications and can recommend architectural changes or spot potential pitfalls in new design early.
• Ability to keep technology skills sharp, and keep up to date on novel industry happenings, issues and threats. 
• Experience developing in Java and/or Python. 
• Experience with Microservices. 
• Experience with Java Spring Boot.
• Experience in software delivery pipelines, CI/CD systems, and software deployment and orchestration systems such as Kubernetes and/or Docker.
• Experience with relational databases (MySQL, Postgres, MS SQL Server, Oracle, etc.).
• Production experience with modern engineering and cloud tools.  (We use AWS)
• Experience with scaling large, transactional systems and data sharding.
• Ability to break down silos within and across functions and influence others to reach the best outcome.
• Ability to build deep cross-functional relationships, facilitate the right conversations, and settle disagreements by managing different viewpoints.
• Ability to get buy-in and influence stakeholders across a variety of audiences. 
• Ability to present clear and concise messages tailored to various audiences; able to communicate in a clear, concise, and respectful manner both verbally and in writing.
• Experience making technical trade offs and navigating technical complexities.
• Experience investing time to coach and mentor.

Nice to haves

• Experience with payments or the FinTech space
• Contributions to technical blogs, a public Github repo, or to open source projects

Our (typical) process:

1. Application submission
2. Recruiter video call
3. Hiring Manager video call
4. Coding interview
5. Virtual “Onsite” consisting of four 45-60 minute rounds
6. Offer!

#LI-Hybrid