Staff Software Engineer - Analytics & Data Architecture

About the role

You'll own the data layer behind our analytics product and design of our analytics architecture and data model. Today that's a high-performance analytical store serving customer-facing queries; where we're headed is a tiered platform that separates our system of record, a low-latency serving tier, and a batch/ML tier. You'll keep the serving layer fast and reliable while designing and building that broader architecture, deciding where each workload lives based on measured latency, cost, and isolation.

This is a hands-on engineering role with strong architectural influence. You'll write code and also shape the multi-quarter direction of the analytics platform.

What you'll do

• Find and fix database performance and scaling problems.
• Own the schema and data model for our analytical data.
• Design and build our analytics architecture: a tiered platform spanning our system of record, a low-latency serving tier, and a batch/ML tier.
• Decide where each workload runs across those tiers, backing placement decisions with real benchmarks rather than vendor claims.
• Build observability into the data layer so problems surface early.
• Partner with the ingestion team to keep the read and write paths coherent as schemas evolve.

What we're looking for

Must-have

• Deep, production experience operating a database or analytical store under concurrent, customer-facing load: you can reason from a query plan to a fix, not just from documentation.
• Strong SQL and a real mental model of columnar / OLAP execution.
• Solid backend engineering. Our stack is Java, but we care more that you can read and modify a real codebase than which tools you've used.
• Data architecture experience: you've designed or materially shaped a multi-tier data platform and can defend those decisions with measurements.

Strongly preferred

• Lakehouse experience: Databricks, Spark, Delta Lake / Iceberg, or comparable.
• Experience designing schemas for wide, semi-structured event data (nested objects, maps, JSON).
• Streaming ingestion experience (Kafka or similar).
• Track record of a migration or major re-architecture, with the cost/latency reasoning to back the decisions.

Nice-to-have

• ClickHouse experience.
• Connection-pool and JDBC-level tuning experience.
• Familiarity with feature-flagged rollouts of query-engine behavior changes.
• Open-source contributions to a query engine or related tooling.

Benefits

• Compensation: Competitive salary and equity packages, including a 401k plan
• Flexibility: Remote-first culture — work from anywhere
• Health: 100% Employer covered comprehensive health, dental, and vision insurance with a top tier plan for you and your dependents (US)
• Balance: Unlimited PTO policy
• Technical: AI First company; both Co-Founders are engineers at heart; and over 50% of the company is Engineering and Product
• Culture: Family-Friendly environment; Regular team events and offsites
• Development: Unparalleled learning and professional development opportunities
• Impact: Making the internet safer by protecting online transactions