Principal Software Engineer

As Marqeta’s Principal Software Engineer on this team you'll own the technical roadmap for the core platform, stand up high-impact projects and drive them to completion, and partner with engineering leaders on operational excellence across the org.

Marqeta's Core Issuing & Processing team owns the systems that authorize, clear, and settle every transaction on our platform. Six domains sit in our scope: Onboarding, Issuing, Digital Wallets, Authorization & Clearing, Transaction Controls, and Ledger. These are real-time, always-on, money-movement systems. A dropped message or a double-posted ledger entry is a customer-visible failure.

Authorization runs on a fixed response budget set by the networks, and there's no option to trade correctness to make it. Balance, spend controls, velocity counters, and funding holds are read and written under strict consistency. Concurrent authorizations against the same card must serialize so the same funds are never committed twice. Every write path is idempotent against network retries and out-of-order messages, and every unmatched clearing record has to reconcile after the fact. We run active in multiple regions with no maintenance window. Failure to meet any of these constraints results in a declined transaction for a cardholder.

We work Flexible First . This role can be performed remotely in the United States, only in one of our National locations , which you can review here .

The Impact You’ll Have

Own the technical roadmap and author the system designs other engineers build from

Spend significant time in the codebase, writing, reviewing, and optimizing code across the issuing and processing stack

Drive the technical initiatives that move reliability, latency, and cost on our core processing engines

Partner with Product to turn requirements into designs across onboarding, issuing, digital wallets, authorization and clearing, transaction controls, and ledger

Mentor technical leads, influence stakeholders, and set the success metrics that raise the engineering bar org-wide

Make the hard-to-reverse calls: data model changes, consistency guarantees, failure and degradation strategy, blast radius containment

Who You Are

12+ years of hands-on engineering experience, and you are still writing code

Deep experience with real-time transactional systems, meaning synchronous request and response paths that operate under a hard latency budget and cannot return an incorrect result

You have owned a system at four nines or better and can explain what that required, including the failure modes you designed for, how the system degraded under load, and what you changed after an outage

A strong track record on data consistency under concurrency, covering idempotency, distributed transaction patterns, reconciliation, the tradeoffs between at-least-once and exactly-once delivery, and how you recover when a downstream system partially applies a write

You've written the system designs, defended them in review, and operated what you designed in production

Experience building and operating systems across multiple regions, including failover you've tested or run

Experience developing and scaling microservices on modern cloud infrastructure, preferably AWS

Strong JVM fundamentals. Our stack is Java, Spring Boot, Kubernetes, Terraform, Helm, Kafka, and AWS services, and we don't expect all of it on day one.

Nice-To-Haves

Double-entry ledger or financial reconciliation systems at scale

Experience in payment processing, card issuing, acquiring, or network integration, including JPOS or another ISO 8583 stack

Domain experience in authorization, clearing, settlement, or tokenization

Master's degree in Software Engineering

Your Manager

Arash Afrooze, Sr Director, Software Engineering

Recruiter For This Role

Prashant

Typical Process

Application Submission

Recruiter phone call

Hiring manager video call

Virtual “Onsite” consisting of 4-5, 45 min calls

Compensation and Benefits

Marqeta is a Flex First company which allows you to choose your best working environment, whether that be from home or at a company office. To support Flex First, we calibrate pay to a competitive value according to working location. Compensation is aligned according to the National geo-tier within the United States:

National : A baseline tier that applies to most of the geographic territory of the United States.

When determining salaries, we consider several factors including, but not limited to, skills, prior experience, and work location. The new-hire base salary range for this position is:

National: $242,400 - $303,000

We also believe in recognizing the contributions of our people. That's why we award annual bonuses to eligible employees, rewarding both individual performance and the success of the entire company.

Along with monetary compensation, Marqeta offers

Multiple health insurance options

Flexible time off – take what you need

Retirement savings program with company contribution and after tax contributions

Equity in a publicly-traded company and an Employee Stock Purchase Program

Family-forming benefits, fertility support, and up to 20 weeks of Parental Leave

Free therapy sessions, financial and professional coaching, and legal advice

Monthly stipend to support our remote work model

Annual “development dollars” to support our people growth and development

Through Flex First, the freedom to live and work wherever you and your family thrive

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

Marqeta is an equal opportunity employer committed to an inclusive workplace that fosters belonging. We do not discriminate based on race, color, religion, sex (including pregnancy, lactation, childbirth, or related medical conditions), veteran status or uniformed service member status, age, national origin or ancestry, citizenship or immigration status, physical or mental disability, gender identity, gender expression, sexual orientation, genetic information (including testing or characteristics) or any other characteristic protected 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