Staff Engineer - Data Foundations

About the Role

Adyen is building a top-tier data team across San Francisco and Amsterdam. The goal is to accelerate data as our most differentiating and least replicable asset across our company. We are focusing on the foundations: the things that make data work as one thing. We decide how it fits together, what it means, and how anyone, human or AI, can trust and use it.

The team is new and sits at the heart of our engineering organization. You will join as one of its technical leaders. You will architect data and work on complex challenges across the company, multiplying your impact through the teams and people you work with. You win them over with good design, working prototypes and trust. By driving decisions through ambiguity, you will shape the next generation of Adyen's data.

You will be based in San Francisco and work closely with the Data Foundations lead in Amsterdam. You will have a lot of room to run your own week.

What you will do

• Build greenfield: The mandate, the architecture and the standards are being written now. You help write them.
• Design the foundation: Set the target architecture for shared data models, data contracts and the semantic layer that every domain builds on.
• Give every metric one clear meaning: Work with domain teams so each core metric is defined once and owned by the domain that creates it. Variants get their own names.
• Make data contracts the norm: Agree contracts between producers and consumers, with owners, versions and automatic checks. Consumers are never surprised.
• Build lineage in from the start: Anyone can trace a figure to its source without asking the engineer who built the pipeline.
• Help teams ship data products: Guide domain teams to publish datasets with a clear owner, schema and service level. They own the product. You own the standard.
• Stay hands-on: Build prototypes, review designs and solve hard problems in the data stack.
• Partner across Adyen: Product, Finance, Compliance, Platform Engineering and domain leads. Win the argument with data and a working prototype.
• Grow other engineers: Mentor engineers in Data Foundations and in the domains. Help them solve problems with their own ideas, and raise the bar in design reviews.

Who you are

• You have 10+ years in data engineering or data architecture, and you have worked at Staff scope. You have set direction for more than one team, and you are still hands on.
• You pick your own problems. You see what needs to change and drive it to done without being told.
• You have designed shared data models, data contracts or semantic layers that many teams build on, and you can defend the trade-offs.
• You have changed what other teams built without any authority over them. You did it with data, prototypes and trust.
• You explain hard ideas in plain words to engineers, finance people and executives. You write clearly.
• You work well with Engineering, Product, Finance, Compliance and other stakeholders, across time zones.

Interview Process

Ensuring a smooth and enjoyable candidate experience is critical for us. We aim to get back to you regarding your application within 5 business days. Our interview process tends to take about 4 weeks to complete, but may fluctuate depending on the role.