Staff Software Engineer, Data Infrastructure

Patreon is a media and community platform where over 300,000 creators give their biggest fans access to exclusive work and experiences. We offer creators a variety of ways to engage with their fans and build a lasting business including: paid memberships, free memberships, community chats, live video, and selling to fans directly with one-time purchases. Ultimately our goal is simple: fund the creative class. And we're leaders in that space, with: - $10 billion+ generated by creators since Patreon's inception - 100 million+ free memberships for fans who may not be ready to pay just yet, and - 25 million+ paid memberships on Patreon today. We're continuing to invest heavily in building the best creator platform with the best team in the creator economy and are looking for a Senior/Staff Software Engineer, Data Infrastructure to support our mission. This role is remote, with optional in-person attendance in either the New York or San Francisco office. About the Team The Data Foundations team at Patreon builds the pipelines, models, and infrastructure that power both customer-facing and internal data products. The Data Infrastructure function within the team owns the foundational platform — streaming, batch, and data lake infrastructure — that every data pipeline, analytics workload, and ML system at Patreon runs on. You'll join a small, high-craft team that partners across Product, Data Science, Infrastructure, and the rest of Engineering to make sure the platform underneath all of that work is reliable, scalable, and easy for other engineers to build on. About the Role - Architect, build, and operate large scale batch and streaming platforms that directly power Patreon product features, analytics, and experimentation. - Stand up and scale event-driven and streaming systems (Kafka, Kinesis, PubSub, or similar) for real-time data ingestion, transformation, aggregation, and delivery to different data storage systems. - Build self-serve data platforms that let engineers, data scientists, and analysts safely discover data, define contracts, and create and operate pipelines with minimal friction. - Partner with the broader Infrastructure, Platform, and product engineering to drive architectural decisions across storage, compute, deployment, and orchestration to align the data ecosystem with Patreon’s roadmap. - Build the tooling, monitoring, and observability that gives engineers confidence in the data platform's reliability and performance. - Mentor other engineers on infrastructure and streaming best practices, and help shape the long-term data infrastructure roadmap. What you'll need: - 8+ years of software engineering experience, including 4+ years focused on data or platform infrastructure. - Deep, hands-on experience architecting both batch (Airflow, Dagster, or similar) and stream processing systems at scale (Spark, Flink, Kafka Streams, or similar). - Familiarity with data quality, lineage, observability, and governance tooling. - Strong programming skills in Python (Java, Scala, or Go a plus) and SQL. - Familiarity with cloud infrastructure and broad fluency across data stores: Object storage (S3), RDMS (MySQL, or Postgres, etc.), Key value (DynamoDB), OLAP (Clickhouse, Pinot, or Druid, etc.), search/indexing (Elasticsearch) plus data flow patterns for keeping them in sync with source systems. - Excellent collaboration and communication skills; comfortable driving cross-functional infrastructure decisions. - Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or a related field, or the equivalent. Bonus if you have: - Experience with Delta Lake/Iceberg, AWS, or Databricks. - Contributed to open-source streaming or infrastructure tooling. - Experience supporting ML/AI workflows, training pipelines, or evaluation systems. We hire talented and passionate people from different backgrounds because workplace diversity and inclusion is critical to our ability to serve creators worldwide. If you’re excited about a role but…