Staff Software Data Engineer - Credit Karma

About the role

This is a foundational engineering role — you will build the frameworks and infrastructure that other engineers across Credit Karma use to ship data-intensive features. If you care about developer experience, system reliability, and solving hard distributed systems problems at scale, this team is for you.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and maintain high-throughput, low-latency data frameworks used across Credit Karma's engineering organization, including ETL templates, persistence libraries, and streaming data pipelines
• Develop and extend Scala-based microservices and frameworks built on Finagle, Akka Streams, and gRPC that process petabytes of data daily
• Build and optimize cloud-native data pipelines on Google Cloud Platform using Dataflow (Apache Beam), Pub/Sub, BigQuery, and Spanner
• Own and evolve our Kafka-based streaming infrastructure — designing producers, consumers, and connectors that handle hundreds of terabytes of events per day with strict latency and durability guarantees
• Create persistence frameworks that provide a unified, type-safe API for reading and writing across Spanner, MySQL, and BigQuery
• Design and implement encryption, decryption, and fine-grained access control capabilities as reusable framework features, ensuring compliance with data governance requirements
• Create self-service developer tooling — CLI tools, templates, and onboarding automation — that reduces the time for other teams to adopt the data platform from weeks to hours
• Drive technical design through architecture reviews and Technical Design Documents (TDDs), influencing decisions across the broader Data & AI organization
• Participate in on-call rotations and build observability (dashboards, alerting, metrics) into every system you ship

Qualifications

• 7+ years of professional software engineering experience building backend services and data infrastructure in Scala, Java, or a similar JVM language
• 7+ years of experience designing and operating high-throughput, low-latency distributed systems that process data at petabyte scale
• 3+ years of experience with streaming and messaging platforms such as Apache Kafka, Google Pub/Sub, or equivalent
• 3+ years of experience building data pipelines on a major cloud platform (GCP, AWS, or Azure), including services like Dataflow, BigQuery, Spanner, or their equivalents
• Professional experience with RPC frameworks such as Finagle, gRPC, or Akka for building production-grade service-to-service communication
• Strong understanding of software engineering best practices including CI/CD, version control (Git), code review, and automated testing