Remote Senior Lakehouse Platform Engineer

Affirm; Baltimore (MD); On-site; USD 204,000 - 290,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health care coverage – affirm covers

Flexible Spending Wallets

Time off – vacation and holidays

ESPP – employee stock purchase plan

Job summary

Affirm is seeking an experienced data platform engineer to own the Lakehouse Platform, with focus on Iceberg, Spark, and Snowflake. You will influence strategy, design secure data capabilities, and collaborate across engineering and analytics teams to deliver scalable, compliant data infrastructure.

You will mentor engineers and drive best practices in governance, data modeling, testing, and CI/CD, while optimizing performance and cost in a remote-first, nationwide U.S. environment.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of experience in software engineering, data infrastructure, or data platform engineering.
• Hands-on experience leading teams to build critical data infrastructure.
• Snowflake / Analytical Warehouses: Hands-on experience with Snowflake or comparable analytical data warehouses, including access control, data masking, query optimization, and cost management.
• Lakehouse and Big Data: Strong experience with Apache Iceberg, Spark, and cloud-native data lake architectures.
• 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.
• 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.

Responsibilities

• Influence technical strategy: Define and drive the long‑term technical roadmap for Affirms Lakehouse Platform across Apache Iceberg, Spark, Snowflake, and cloud‑native storage, balancing scalability, reliability, governance, performance, and cost.
• Design and develop: Architect and implement platform capabilities that make analytical data secure, trustworthy, discoverable, and easy to use across Affirms engineering, analytics, machine learning, and business teams.
• Strengthen governance and access controls: Design and operate secure, auditable data access capabilities across Snowflake and the lakehouse platform, including RBAC, dynamic data masking, cataloging, lineage, classification, and privacy policy enforcement.
• 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.
• Collaborate cross‑functionally: Partner with Infrastructure, Lakehouse Analytics, Analytics Engineering, Machine Learning, BI, Product Engineering, and SRE to translate stakeholder needs into durable platform architecture.
• Innovate: Stay ahead 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, raise technical quality, and foster an inclusive culture of design rigor, operational excellence, and continuous learning.

Skills

Technical leadership

Collaboration

Communication skills

Python

SQL

JVM languages

Data governance

Observability

CI/CD

Education

Bachelor's degree in related field

Tools

Terraform

Job description

Affirm is seeking an experienced data platform engineer to own the Lakehouse Platform, with focus on Iceberg, Spark, and Snowflake. You will influence strategy, design secure data capabilities, and collaborate across engineering and analytics teams to deliver scalable, compliant data infrastructure.

You will mentor engineers and drive best practices in governance, data modeling, testing, and CI/CD, while optimizing performance and cost in a remote-first, nationwide U.S. environment.