Software Data Engineer - Credit Karma

About the Team

The teams own the end-to-end data path at Credit Karma — from service emission to datalake landing to consumer hydration. We build the frameworks, pipelines, and persistence layers that every product team depends on to move data reliably  systems ingest hundreds of terabytes per day across Kafka, Pub/Sub, and Dataflow, persist to Spanner and Big Query, and serve low-latency reads to real-time product experiences through our Unified Consumer Profile (UCP) platform.

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.

• 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, Big Query, 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

• Build persistence frameworks that provide a unified, type-safe API for reading and writing across Spanner, MySQL, and Big Query

• 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

• You will own foundational infrastructure — the frameworks you build are the building blocks that every data pipeline and product feature at Credit Karma depends on

• You will work at real scale — hundreds of terabytes per day, millions of consumer profiles hydrated in real time, and strict SLAs that demand engineering rigor

• You will shape developer experience — designing the APIs, SDKs, and tooling that hundreds of engineers across the company interact with daily

• You will solve hard, novel problems — from building MySQL CDC pipelines with cloud-native encryption to designing Apache Beam framework SDKs that support both Java and Python

• You will be part of a high-impact, collaborative team with a strong culture of technical ownership and continuous learning

• 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, Big Query, 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

• Experience building reusable frameworks, SDKs, or platform libraries consumed by other engineering teams — you think about developer experience as a product

• Experience with Apache Beam (Dataflow) including custom transforms, side inputs, windowing strategies, and pipeline optimization

• Ex…