Senior Software Engineer, Backend – Lake Analytics Platform

This is a fully remote position, open to applicants in California, +4 more states.

📋 Description

• Develop and manage essential platform capabilities: Create and implement platform features that empower engineers at Affirm to build, deploy, and manage data applications efficiently at scale — including automated provisioning, deployment pipelines, access control, service lifecycle management, and reliability tools.

• Create integrations: Construct and oversee integrations between the platform and internal systems — such as CI/CD pipelines, identity and secrets management, external APIs, and event-driven hooks — to ensure application teams have secure, dependable, and self-service access to the necessary tools.

• Enhance data access and governance: Design and maintain secure data access protocols across the platform's analytical infrastructure, featuring RBAC, managed-access schemas, dynamic data masking, secure views, and cross-database grants that ensure platform data is reliable without causing operational delays.

• Automate repetitive tasks and enable self-service: Recognize recurring support issues — like access provisioning, data pipeline failures, service health management, and secrets management — and develop automation and tools that allow platform users to handle these tasks independently, removing manual administrative responsibilities.

• Boost observability and incident response: Establish telemetry, alerting, and logging infrastructure so platform teams and application owners can troubleshoot and resolve issues autonomously. Create runbooks and operational strategies that minimize the impact of incidents and reduce recovery time.

• Assist with platform operations: Engage in on-call duties, manage production incidents across platform services and their associated applications, and perform platform-level maintenance with consideration for the engineers and workflows reliant on the platform.

• Contribute to the evolving platform roadmap: Collaborate in designing and building cutting-edge platform capabilities — such as semantic layer infrastructure, agentic application patterns, and AI-driven data tools — as the platform expands to accommodate Affirm's most ambitious data objectives.

• Elevate engineering standards: Maintain and enforce high expectations in code reviews, design, operational preparedness, and incident follow-through. Assist in establishing patterns that other contributors can adopt and develop further.

⛳️ Requirements

• Analytical Data Platform Expertise: Hands-on experience managing a cloud analytical data platform (e.g., Snowflake, Databricks, BigQuery, or similar), covering access control design, data masking and governance, compute management, and cost optimization.

• Container and Deployment Knowledge: Experience in creating and managing containerized applications — including Docker image management, CI/CD pipeline design (Buildkite, GitHub Actions, or similar), deployment automation, and rollout strategies for production services.

• Platform and Developer Tooling: Background in developing internal platforms, developer tooling, or self-service infrastructure that enhances productivity for other engineers.

• Integrations and Networking Skills: Comfort in building integrations between systems — including REST APIs, OAuth/OIDC, webhook ingestion, secrets management, egress networking configuration, and identity/SSO patterns in a managed cloud environment.

• Backend Engineering Proficiency: Strong skills in Python and SQL for developing reliable and maintainable platform services.

• Operational Accountability: Demonstrated operational instincts — you instrument your systems, create runbooks, manage alerts, and consider the on-call burden as a design constraint from the outset.

• Knowledge of Agentic and AI-Ready Data Tools: Familiarity with or interest in semantic layer design, LLM-integrated platform workflows, and agentic data tools.

• Effective Communication and Collaboration: Strong written and verbal communication skills. Proficient in working with application teams, security, infrastructure, and platform users to define, prioritize, and deliver solutions — especially when faced with ambiguous requirements.

• This position requires either comparable practical experience or a Bachelor's degree in a related field.

🏝️ Benefits

• Health care coverage - Affirm covers all premiums for all levels of coverage for you and your dependents.

• Flexible Spending Wallets - generous stipends for spending on Technology, Food, various Lifestyle needs, and family-forming expenses.

• Time off - competitive vacation and holiday schedules allowing you to take time off to rest and recharge.

• ESPP - An employee stock purchase plan enabling you to buy shares of Affirm at a discount.