Staff Software Engineer, Backend – Lake Analytics Platform

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

📋 Description

• Influence technical strategy: Define and guide the long-term technical roadmap for Affirm’s Lakehouse Platform utilizing Apache Iceberg, Spark, Snowflake, and cloud-native storage, while balancing scalability, reliability, governance, performance, and cost.

• Design and develop: Architect and implement platform capabilities that ensure analytical data is secure, trustworthy, discoverable, and user-friendly across Affirm’s engineering, analytics, machine learning, and business teams.

• Strengthen governance and access controls: Create and manage secure, auditable data access capabilities across Snowflake and the lakehouse platform, which includes RBAC, dynamic data masking, cataloging, lineage, classification, and enforcement of privacy policies.

• Improve analytics engineering foundations: Collaborate with Analytics Engineering to enhance data modeling, transformation pipelines, testing frameworks, documentation standards, and data quality practices that support reliable self-service analytics.

• Operate at scale: Establish best practices for lakehouse operations, including schema evolution, table maintenance, partitioning, compaction, observability, incident response, production support, and preparation for on-call operations.

• Optimize performance and cost: Identify and implement enhancements across analytical compute and storage, such as Snowflake warehouse tuning, query optimization, storage layout, lifecycle management, cost attribution, and operational efficiency.

• Collaborate cross-functionally: Work alongside Infrastructure, Lakehouse Analytics, Analytics Engineering, Machine Learning, BI, Product Engineering, and SRE to translate stakeholder needs into robust platform architecture.

• Innovate: Keep abreast of industry trends in lakehouse architecture, open table formats, analytical compute engines, data governance, privacy engineering, semantic layers, agentic data tools, and AI-ready data infrastructure.

• Build teams: Mentor engineers, elevate technical quality, and cultivate an inclusive culture of design rigor, operational excellence, and continuous learning.

⛳️ Requirements

• 8+ years of experience in software engineering, data infrastructure, or data platform engineering, including 2+ years in a technical leadership role.

• Practical experience leading teams in building critical data infrastructure.

• Hands-on experience with Snowflake or similar analytical data warehouses, covering access control, data masking, query optimization, and cost management.

• Strong expertise in Apache Iceberg, Spark, and cloud-native data lake architectures.

• Experience with dbt or equivalent transformation frameworks, encompassing data modeling, testing, documentation, and CI/CD practices.

• Proficiency in Python, SQL, or JVM-based languages, with a strong focus on creating clean, maintainable, production-quality systems.

• Familiarity with Terraform or similar automation tools for managing data infrastructure.

• This position requires equivalent 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.