Senior Staff Software Engineer, Backend, Data and Storage Services

This is a fully remote position, open to applicants in United States.

📋 Description

• As a key member of the Data and Storage Services team, you will work in partnership with various teams — including Product, Infrastructure, Lakehouse Infra, Lakehouse Analytics, and Analytics Engineering to:

• Design and enhance Affirm's lakehouse analytics platform, driving strategy around Snowflake, Apache Iceberg, and Spark to create scalable, high-performance analytical infrastructure.

• Develop and implement robust Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) and dynamic data masking policies within Snowflake, ensuring secure, compliant, and auditable data access across the organization.

• Lead the technical direction for analytics engineering practices, including data modeling, transformation pipelines (dbt), and data quality frameworks that enable reliable, self-service analytics.

• Spearhead data governance and privacy engineering initiatives, utilizing tools like Atlan for data cataloging, lineage, classification, and policy enforcement.

• Identify and implement cost optimization strategies across Affirm's analytical compute and storage landscape, including Snowflake warehouse tuning, query optimization, and effective data lifecycle management.

• Collaborate with product engineering, data science, and business intelligence teams to understand their data requirements while providing ongoing guidance on design, architecture, and best practices.

• Establish and advocate for best practices in lakehouse operations at scale, encompassing schema evolution, table maintenance, partitioning strategies, and observability.

• Stay updated on industry trends in analytical data platforms, data governance, and privacy technologies, while identifying opportunities for innovation and enhancement of our data offerings.

• Mentor engineers within the Lake Analytics Platform and Analytics Engineering teams, offering insights on emerging technologies, development practices, and fostering a culture of technical excellence.

• Participate in an on-call rotation and collaborate with other teams such as SRE to address production issues.

⛳️ Requirements

• Over 10 years of experience in software engineering or data engineering, demonstrating a successful history of delivering complex data platform solutions that enhance accessibility, performance, and governance of analytics infrastructure.

• More than 6 years of practical experience with Snowflake or similar analytical data warehouses, including RBAC design, data masking, query optimization, and cost management.

• Strong expertise in Apache Iceberg, Spark, and cloud-native data lake architectures on AWS (S3, EKS).

• Experience with dbt or similar transformation frameworks, encompassing data modeling best practices, testing, and CI/CD for data pipelines.

• Outstanding problem-solving and analytical abilities, capable of identifying and resolving complex technical issues while establishing enduring solutions and processes.

• Proficient in Python and SQL, with a strong focus on clean, maintainable code; familiarity with Kotlin or Go is a plus.

• Proven leadership and mentorship capabilities, with the ability to inspire and guide others. You can work cross-functionally to address technical challenges and influence roadmaps beyond your direct area of responsibility.

• You drive innovation in the platforms you create and manage, with experience in contributing to open-source projects. You are enthusiastic about engaging with the data engineering community.

• Knowledge of automation tools such as Terraform for managing data infrastructure.

• Exceptional communication and interpersonal skills, enabling you to articulate technical concepts clearly to both technical and non-technical audiences.

• This position requires either equivalent practical experience or a Bachelor’s degree in a relevant 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 formation expenses.

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

• ESPP - An employee stock purchase plan that allows you to acquire shares of Affirm at a discount.