Staff Software Engineer, Foundations

Responsibilities

• Lead migration of Vanta’s resource data model from a Mongo-centric architecture to a schema-aware, Postgres-backed solution while maintaining backward compatibility and customer integrations.
• Drive cross-team technical solutions for platform dependencies.
• Design for correctness under eventual consistency, including idempotent session handling, conditional writes, reconciliation, and explicit backpressure.
• Design and evolve high-throughput data ingestion and pipeline architecture for terabyte-scale distributed data streams.
• Expand the Query API into a production platform with schema versioning, joins, exports, tenant isolation, and predictable latency.
• Build externally auditable data infrastructure for compliance evidence.
• Diagnose production-scale issues including hot partitions, unbounded fan-out, and online rewrites of continuously written tables.
• Set architectural direction for Kafka, event queuing, Redis, Postgres, and MongoDB.
• Mentor senior engineers through design reviews, architectural guidance, and hands-on contributions.
• Champion reliability, observability, and operational excellence.
• Use AI tools responsibly to improve engineering efficiency and impact.

Requirements

• Proven experience leading platform migrations while maintaining backward compatibility and availability.
• Strong command of Kafka or equivalent streaming and queuing infrastructure, including partitioning, consumer groups, redelivery, and idempotency.
• Deep experience with distributed systems and data pipeline engineering at enterprise scale.
• Experience designing and operating terabyte-scale ingestion and high-throughput event-processing systems.
• Fluency in relational and document data modeling at scale, particularly Postgres and MongoDB.
• Experience with query planning, connection pooling, and online schema changes on large continuously written tables.
• Experience defining multi-quarter technical roadmaps and delivering them with engineering leadership.
• Solid AWS fundamentals.
• Professional experience with TypeScript and Node.js.
• Ability to communicate complex systems tradeoffs to technical and non-technical audiences.
• Curiosity and sound judgment in applying AI to engineering work.

Compensation & Benefits

• Industry-competitive salary and equity.
• Medical, dental, and vision benefits with dependent coverage fully covered.
• Pension contribution.
• 16 weeks of paid parental leave for all new parents.
• Health and wellness stipend.
• Remote workspace, internet, and cellphone stipends.
• Flexible work hours and location.
• 21 days of vacation time and 80 hours of sick leave.
• 11 company-paid holidays.
• Virtual team-building activities, lunch and learns, and company-wide events.