Software Engineer, Data

Role Description

We're hiring a Staff Data Engineer to design and build the operational data systems that power Keycard — the pipelines, storage layers, and APIs that drive near real-time enforcement, feedback loops, and customer insights. At Keycard, data isn't exhaust — it's core to the product.

• The systems you build will serve both the transactional needs of our core identity services and the OLAP requirements that help organizations understand and improve their security posture.
• You'll balance streaming and batch paradigms — knowing when low-latency streaming is essential and when batch provides clarity and power.
• Your work will span from integrating external data sources to enabling policy evaluation to surfacing insights in dashboards and APIs.
• You'll work directly with founders, product, and the engineers building our core services and SDKs.
• You'll have deep autonomy, accountability to deliver, and the chance to shape the data architecture of a category-defining company from the ground up.

Qualifications

• Strong experience designing resilient pipelines that balance streaming and batch paradigms.
• Fluent in Python, Go, and/or Rust, with experience building with Kafka, Parquet, and Iceberg.
• Excited to design APIs, pipelines, and storage systems end to end.
• Thrive in 0→1 environments and make hard trade-offs to deliver today while laying groundwork for the long-term system.
• Lead by example — raising the bar for technical excellence while helping those around you grow.
• Communicate clearly through written plans and async updates, and know when to jump on a call.

Requirements

• Experience designing and shipping developer-facing APIs, SDKs, or tools that expose data systems in ergonomic and powerful ways.
• Contributions to open source data infrastructure projects (Kafka, Flink, Iceberg) or experience building libraries used by other developers.
• Active experimentation with agents in your own workflows (Claude Code, Cursor, MCP) and opinions on how to make data systems agent-friendly.
• Strong opinions about the intersection of data, identity, and agents — and excitement about shaping that future at Keycard.

Benefits

• Work every day at the frontier of agent-native systems — shipping, inventing, and iterating on technology that hasn’t been built before.
• Huge autonomy, the opportunity to gain mastery, and the chance to work in a team that holds each other accountable to succeed.
• Market-competitive salaries and generous equity packages (4-year vest, 1-year cliff).
• Health, dental, vision, and paramedical coverage for you and your family.
• 4 weeks vacation, 11 statutory holidays, and 1 volunteer day annually.
• A new MacBook Pro, a $500 stipend for peripherals, and the best AI tools available.
• Remote-first team prioritizing asynchronous collaboration, with hiring focused in North and South America.