Staff Software Engineer, Data

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 Staff Software Engineer to support our mission.

This role is remote with optional in-person attendance in either the New York or San Francisco office. Expect to travel a handful of times per year for team building and collaboration offsites.

About the Team

The Data Engineering team at Patreon builds pipelines, models, and tooling that power both customer-facing and internal data products. As a Staff Software Engineer on the team, you’ll architect and scale the data foundation that underpins our creator analytics product, discovery and safety ML systems, internal product analytics, executive reporting, experimentation, and company-wide decision-making.

We’re a team of pragmatic engineers who care deeply about data quality, reliable systems, and clear definitions. We partner closely with Product, Data Science, Infrastructure, Finance, Marketing, and Sales teams to ensure that the insights driving Patreon’s business and product are trustworthy, explainable, and actionable.

About the Role

• Design, build, and maintain the pipelines that power all data use cases. This includes ingestion of raw data from production databases, object storage, and message queues, and vendors into our Data Lake, and building core datasets and metrics.

• Develop intuitive, performant, and scalable data models (facts, dimensions, aggregations) that support product features, internal analytics, experimentation, and machine learning workloads.

• Implement robust batch and streaming pipelines using Spark, Python, and Airflow. Handle complex patterns like incremental processing, event-time partitioning, and late data handling.

• Define and enforce standards for accuracy, completeness, lineage, and dependency management. Build monitoring and observability so teams can trust what they’re using.

• Work with Product, Data Science, Infrastructure, Finance, Marketing, and Sales to turn ambiguous questions into well-scoped, high-impact data solutions.

• Pay down technical debt, improve automation, and drive best practices in data modeling, testing, and reliability. Mentor peers and help shape the future of Patreon’s data.

About You

• 6+ years of experience in software development, with at least 2+ years of experience in building scalable, production-grade data pipelines.

• Expert-level proficiency in SQL and distributed data processing tools like Spark, Flink, Kafka Streams, or similar.

• Strong programming foundations in Python or similar language, with good software engineering design patterns and principles (testing, CI/CD, monitoring).

• Expert in modern data lakes (eg: Delta Lake, Iceberg). Familiar with data warehouses (eg: Snowflake, Redshift, BigQuery) and production data stores such as relational (eg: MySQL, PostgreSQL), object (eg: S3), key-value (eg: DynamoDB) and message queues (eg: Kinesis, Kafka)

• Excellent collaboration and communication skills; comfortable partnering with non-technical stakeholders, writing crisp design docs, giving actionable feedback, and can influence without authority across teams.

• Understanding of data modeling and metric design principles.

• Passionate about data quality, system reliability, and empowering others through well-crafted data assets.

• Highly motivated self-starter who thrives in a collaborative, fast-paced environment and takes pride in high-craft, high-impact work.

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or a related field, or the equivalent

About Patreon

Patreon powers creators to do what they love and get paid by the people who love what they do. Our team is passionate about making this mission and our core values come to life every day in our work. Through this work, our Patronauts:

• Put Creators First | They’re the reason we’re here. When creators win, we win.

• Build with Craft | We sign our name to every deliverable, just like the creators we serve.

• Make it Happen | We don’t quit. We learn and deliver.

• Win Together | We grow as individuals. We win as a team.

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 your past experience doesn’t match with every bullet point outlined above, we strongly encourage you to apply anyway. If you’re a creator at heart, are energized by our mission, and share our company values, we’d love to hear from you.

Patreon is proud to be an equal opportunity employer. We provide employment opportunities without regard to age, race, color, ancestry, national origin, religion, disability, sex, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, veteran status, or any other protected class. If you need a reasonable accommodation during the interview process, please let us know via email at accommodations@patreon.

Patreon offers a competitive benefits package including and not limited to salary, equity plans, healthcare, flexible time off, company holidays and recharge days, commuter benefits, lifestyle stipends, learning and development stipends, patronage, parental leave, and 401k plan with matching.

Patreon operates under a hybrid work model, where employees based in office locations are expected to come into the office two days per week, excluding sick time and paid leave. The goal of this policy is to be intentional about the in-person time we spend together to strengthen the feeling of community at Patreon. Candidates hired into remote-eligible roles are not expected to meet the same requirements.

At Patreon, we believe in fair and transparent pay. In compliance with New York and California pay transparency laws, we are sharing the expected salary range for this role.

The posted salary range is dependent on the location and the level. This range may encompass multiple levels within the role’s job family. The final offer will be based on candidate’s experience, skills, competencies, and geographic location, aligning with the appropriate job level within Patreon’s leveling framework. For remote employees located outside CA and NY, salary may vary based on location and local market conditions.

Patreon reserves the right to modify or update compensation and benefits at any time.