Staff Backend Engineer, Lakehouse Platform (Iceberg) Remote

Kibbi Technologies Inc.; Halifax; On-site; CAD 181,000 - 241,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health care coverage

Flexible Spending Wallets

Time off & leave

Employee Stock Purchase Plan (ESPP)

Job summary

Affirm is seeking a Senior Data Platform Engineer to own and advance the Lakehouse Platform, focusing on Iceberg, Spark, and Snowflake. You will drive architectural strategy, build scalable data infrastructure, and ensure secure, governed analytics access for engineering, analytics, ML, and business teams.

The role requires 8+ years in data infrastructure with 2+ years of leadership, hands-on experience with Snowflake, Iceberg, and dbt, and strong Python/SQL/JVM skills.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of experience in software engineering, data infrastructure, or data platform engineering.
• 2+ years of technical leadership responsibilities.
• Hands-on leadership leading teams to build critical data infrastructure.
• Snowflake/analytical warehouses experience including access control, data masking, and cost management.
• Lakehouse and big data experience with Iceberg, Spark, and cloud-native architectures.
• Analytics engineering with dbt or equivalent transformation frameworks.
• Proficiency in Python, SQL, or JVM-based languages;clean production-quality code.
• Infrastructure as Code experience with Terraform.

Responsibilities

• Define and drive the long-term technical roadmap for the Lakehouse Platform across Iceberg, Spark, Snowflake, and cloud storage.
• Architect and implement platform capabilities for secure, discoverable analytics data used by multiple teams.
• Design secure, auditable data access across Snowflake and lakehouse components (RBAC, masking, lineage).
• Evolve data modeling, transformations, testing, and data quality with analytics engineering partners.
• Establish best practices for lakehouse operations: schema evolution, partitioning, compaction, observability, on-call readiness.
• Improve compute and storage cost-efficiency through tuning and layout improvements.
• Collaborate with Infrastructure, BI, ML, and Product to translate needs into durable architecture.
• Mentor engineers and foster a culture of design rigor and continuous learning.
• Stay ahead of trends in lakehouse tech and AI-enabled data tools.

Skills

Lakehouse Platform

Snowflake Platform

Data Platform Architecture

Governance & Trust

Analytics Engineering

Agentic Data Tools

Technical Leadership

Collaboration

Communication Skills

Education

Bachelor's degree in related field

Tools

Snowflake

Apache Iceberg

Spark

dbt

Terraform

Python

SQL

JVM languages

Job description

Affirm is seeking a Senior Data Platform Engineer to own and advance the Lakehouse Platform, focusing on Iceberg, Spark, and Snowflake. You will drive architectural strategy, build scalable data infrastructure, and ensure secure, governed analytics access for engineering, analytics, ML, and business teams.

The role requires 8+ years in data infrastructure with 2+ years of leadership, hands-on experience with Snowflake, Iceberg, and dbt, and strong Python/SQL/JVM skills.