Affirm
Staff Software Engineer, Backend (Lake Analytics Platform)
Remote Canada · Staff+
Sponsorship not specified$181k-$241kDetected 8 days ago
PythonSQLSnowflakeTerraformCI/CDSite Reliability EngineeringPlatform EngineeringRESTMachine LearningSparkdbtIncident ResponseAccessibilityLeadershipCommunicationCollaboration
About the role
- Affirm is reinventing credit to make it more honest and friendly, giving consumers the flexibility to buy now and pay later without any hidden fees or compounding interest.
- Ensuring that our infrastructure is accessible to all engineers is critical to the success of the business.
Responsibilities
- Influence technical strategy: Define and drive the long-term technical roadmap for Affirm's Lakehouse Platform across Apache Iceberg, Spark, Snowflake, and cloud-native storage, balancing scalability, reliability, governance, performance, and cost.
- Improve analytics engineering foundations: Partner with Analytics Engineering to evolve data modeling, transformation pipelines, testing frameworks, documentation standards, and data quality practices that enable trustworthy 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 readiness for on-call operations.
- Optimize performance and cost: Identify and execute improvements across analytical compute and storage, including Snowflake warehouse tuning, query optimization, storage layout, lifecycle management, cost attribution, and operational efficiency.
- Lakehouse Platform Expertise: Proven experience architecting, building, launching, and operating large-scale OLAP systems, lakehouse platforms, or analytical data infrastructure using technologies such as Apache Iceberg, Spark, Snowflake, and cloud-native storage.
- Agentic Data Tools: Experience building or shaping semantic layers, self-service analytics platforms, internal data applications, or AI-enabled data tools that improve data accessibility and usability.
- Technical Leadership: Demonstrated ability to set technical direction, lead ambiguous platform initiatives, mentor engineers, and influence roadmaps across teams while staying close to implementation details.
- Establish best practices for lakehouse operations, including schema evolution, table maintenance, partitioning, compaction, observability, incident response, production support, and readiness for on-call operations.
- Hands-on experience leading teams to build critical data infrastructure.
Requirements
- Snowflake / Analytical Warehouses: Hands-on experience with Snowflake or comparable analytical data warehouses, including access control, data masking, query optimization, and cost management.
- Analytics Engineering: Experience with dbt or equivalent transformation frameworks, including data modeling, testing, documentation, and CI/CD practices.
- Programming Skills: Proficiency in Python, SQL, or JVM-based languages, with a strong emphasis on clean, maintainable, production-quality systems.
- Affirmers in proximal roles have the flexibility to work remotely, but will occasionally be required to work out of their assigned Affirm office.
- This position requires equivalent practical experience or a Bachelor's degree in a related field.
- Hands-on Leadership: Hands-on experience leading teams to build critical data infrastructure.
- Employees new to Affirm typically come in at the start of the pay range. Affirm focuses on providing a simple and transparent pay structure which is based on a variety of factors, including location, experience and job-related skills.
- Base pay is part of a total compensation package that may include monthly stipends for health, wellness and tech spending, and benefits (including 100% subsidized medical coverage, dental and vision for you and your dependents). In addition, the employees may be eligible for equity rewards offered by Affirm Holdings, Inc. (parent company).
Skills
- Proficiency in Python, SQL, or JVM-based languages, with a strong emphasis on clean, maintainable, production-quality systems.
- Lakehouse and Big Data: Strong experience with Apache Iceberg, Spark, and cloud-native data lake architectures.
- Programming
- Infrastructure as Code: Familiarity with Terraform or similar automation tools for managing data infrastructure.
- Education: This position requires equivalent practical experience or a Bachelor's degree in a related field.
- Pay Grade - P
- Equity Grade - 7
- Employees new to Affirm typically come in at the start of the pay range.
- In addition, the employees may be eligible for equity rewards offered by Affirm Holdings, Inc. (parent company).
- CAN base pay range per year: 181,000 - 241,000
- This posting is for an existing vacancy.
- Affirm is proud to be a remote-first company!
Compensation
- Employees new to Affirm typically come in at the start of the pay range.
Benefits
- Design and develop: Architect and implement platform capabilities that make analytical data secure, trustworthy, discoverable, and easy to use across Affirm's engineering, analytics, machine learning, and business teams.
- Build teams: Mentor engineers, raise technical quality, and foster an inclusive culture of design rigor, operational excellence, and continuous learning.
- Collaboration: Strong ability to partner with engineering, analytics, machine learning, BI, product, and infrastructure teams to translate business needs into durable technical solutions.
This listing is sourced directly from Affirm's careers page and normalized into a canonical job model.