Principal Software Engineer

Marqeta Marqeta · Fintech · Job Requisition - Premium+ ONLY · Core Product

Principal Software Engineer at Marqeta, a fintech company, focusing on the core issuing and processing platform. The role involves owning the technical roadmap, designing scalable and secure systems, optimizing performance and reliability, and mentoring other engineers. The position requires extensive software engineering experience, cloud technologies (AWS), and experience with high-volume, low-latency data infrastructures. The role is primarily focused on building and scaling existing financial products, not AI/ML model development.

What you'd actually do

  1. Own the technical roadmap and author system designs that enable scalable, secure, and operationally efficient card issuing and payment processing products for our customers.
  2. Spend significant time in the codebase – writing, reviewing, and optimizing code across the issuing and processing stack.
  3. Identify and drive high-impact technical initiatives that improve the performance, reliability, and cost-efficiency of our core processing engines.
  4. Collaborate with Product Managers to analyze requirements and provide technical recommendations across onboarding, issuing, digital wallets, authorization & clearing, transaction controls, and ledger.
  5. Mentor and guide technical leads, influence stakeholders, and establish success metrics to drive organization-wide technical excellence.

Skills

Required

  • 12+ years of hands-on software engineering experience
  • software engineering excellence, including design principles, fault tolerance practices, scalability, cost, security & privacy considerations, and test-driven development
  • partnering with product teams to ideate and bring innovative solutions to market
  • developing and scaling microservices using modern cloud technologies, preferably AWS
  • working with high volume / low latency data infrastructures
  • Solid understanding of security engineering best practices and demonstrable experience in designing solutions that adhere to those standards
  • Experience building systems running in multiple regions
  • Team-oriented approach

Nice to have

  • Master's degree in Software Engineering
  • Experience in payment processing, card issuing, or the payments industry
  • Domain experience in authorization, clearing, settlement, tokenization, or ledger systems

What the JD emphasized

  • high-impact projects
  • highly technical initiatives
  • high-impact technical initiatives
  • high volume / low latency data infrastructures
  • non-functional challenges, namely: Scale, Cost, Reliability, Performance, High Availability