Staff Data Engineer

About SecurityScorecard:

SecurityScorecard is the global leader in cybersecurity ratings, with over 12 million companies continuously rated, operating in 64 countries. Founded in 2013 by security and risk experts Dr. Alex Yampolskiy and Sam Kassoumeh and funded by world-class investors, SecurityScorecard’s patented rating technology is used by over 25,000 organizations for self-monitoring, third-party risk management, board reporting, and cyber insurance underwriting; making all organizations more resilient by allowing them to easily find and fix cybersecurity risks across their digital footprint. 

Headquartered in New York City, our culture has been recognized by Inc Magazine as a "Best Workplace,” by Crain’s NY as a "Best Places to Work in NYC," and as one of the 10 hottest SaaS startups in New York for two years in a row. Most recently, SecurityScorecard was named to Fast Company’s annual list of the World’s Most Innovative Companies for 2023 and to the Achievers 50 Most Engaged Workplaces in 2023 award recognizing “forward-thinking employers for their unwavering commitment to employee engagement.”  SecurityScorecard is proud to be funded by world-class investors including Silver Lake Waterman, Moody’s, Sequoia Capital, GV and Riverwood Capital.

About the Team:

Be part of an exciting and growing Data Engineering team at the core of everything we do. SecurityScorecard's ratings platform processes enormous volumes of data — and the reliability, performance, and integrity of our data pipelines directly determines the quality of our product. Our team operates with a strong emphasis on collaboration, shared ownership, and engineering excellence. You will be hands-on across the full software development life cycle, working alongside a global team that values both technical depth and clear communication. Check out our tech blog and let us know if you're our next star.

https://techblog.securityscorecard.com/

About the Role:

We are looking for a Staff Engineer to join our Data Engineering team. This is a senior individual contributor role with real technical leadership scope — you will serve as a technical anchor for the team, raising the bar on engineering quality, mentoring engineers at earlier career stages, and owning complex, high-impact systems end-to-end. Our data infrastructure is Scala and Spark-first, processing data at significant scale to power security ratings for over 2 million companies worldwide. If you thrive in environments where you own hard problems, make independent architectural decisions, and can operate with minimal handholding, this role was built for you.

This role is open to candidates based in Canada (Eastern time zone preferred) or LATAM.

What You Will Do:

• Serve as a technical lead and de facto anchor for the data engineering team — setting the standard for code quality, system design, and engineering judgment
• Own complex, ambiguous data engineering problems end-to-end, from architecture through deployment and ongoing reliability
• Mentor and level up junior and mid-level engineers through code reviews, design discussions, and direct feedback
• Partner with Product Managers and cross-functional stakeholders to translate business requirements into scalable, maintainable technical solutions
• Drive architectural decisions across infrastructure, application, and data tiers — and be accountable for their outcomes
• Identify and lead initiatives to improve system performance, reliability, and engineering efficiency across the team
• Participate in all stages of the software development life cycle, from design and development through deployment and maintenance
• Implement comprehensive testing and performance tuning to ensure system stability and uptime

Responsibilities:

• Define technical approaches for large-scope projects, estimate effort, and help unblock teammates at all levels
• Write clean, maintainable, production-grade code that sets the example for readability, design patterns, reusability, and testing
• Own end-to-end systems across infrastructure, application, and data tiers — not just individual components
• Lead code reviews with a focus on raising team standards, not just catching bugs
• Continuously monitor performance metrics across owned systems and proactively drive improvements and refactors
• Contribute to a culture of documentation, knowledge sharing, and engineering rigor

Our Tech Stack:

• Scala, Apache Spark, Python
• Airflow
• ScyllaDB, PostgreSQL, ClickHouse, Hive, Redis, Kafka, Kafka Connect
• Docker, Jenkins, Terraform, AWS

Technical Skills:

• 8+ years of experience in the Data Engineering space, building and maintaining large-scale data pipelines
• Deep proficiency in Scala — our data platform is Scala-first and this is the primary language for this role
• Expert-level experience with Apache Spark and distributed data processing at scale
• Strong system design and architecture skills — you can reason about trade-offs, design for reliability, and communicate your decisions clearly
• Experience designing, building, and maintaining ETL pipelines and data infrastructure in production environments
• Comfort with high-throughput, high-volume systems (TB-scale data processing)
• Familiarity with strongly-typed and functional programming principles
• Track record of mentoring engineers and elevating team technical quality
• Proficiency with version control tools, particularly Git

Nice To Have:

• Experience with a variety of data formats (structured/unstructured, flat files, XML, JSON, relational, Parquet)
• Experience in the cybersecurity domain or working on security-adjacent data products
• Prior experience in a Staff or Principal IC role with cross-team technical influence