Senior Backend Platform Engineer – Data Infra (Remote US)

Affirm; United States; On-site; USD 173,000 - 233,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health care coverage

Flexible Spending Wallets

Time off

ESPP

Job summary

Affirm is seeking a Senior Software Engineer, Backend (Lake Analytics Platform) to design, build, and operate core data platform capabilities in a remote US setting. You will enable data applications at scale, implement secure access, and partner across teams to improve reliability and self-service tooling.

You will work with Python and SQL on platform services, drive governance and automation, and contribute to observability, incident response, and future AI-ready tooling for the data platform

Qualifications

• Requires either equivalent practical experience or a Bachelor's degree in a related field.
• Experience operating a cloud analytical data platform and governance features is highly desirable.
• Strong scripting and data tooling capabilities expected (Python/SQL).

Responsibilities

• Design and implement platform features enabling data applications at scale, including provisioning, deploy pipelines, access control, and reliability tooling.
• Build and maintain integrations between the platform and internal systems (CI/CD, identity/secrets management, external APIs).
• Strengthen data access governance with RBAC, dynamic masking, secure views, and cross-database grants.
• Automate toil to provide self-service capabilities for platform users and reduce manual admin work.
• Improve observability, telemetry, alerting, and incident response with runbooks and patterns.
• Support platform operations during on-call coverage and maintenance activities.
• Contribute to the evolving platform roadmap (semantic layer, AI-native data tooling).
• Raise engineering standards via code reviews, design, and operational readiness.

Skills

Platform depth

Containerization

Developer tooling

Integrations & networking

Python & SQL

Operational ownership

AI-ready data tools

Communication

Education

Bachelor's degree or equivalent practical experience

Tools

Docker

Buildkite

GitHub Actions

CI/CD pipelines

Job description

Affirm is seeking a Senior Software Engineer, Backend (Lake Analytics Platform) to design, build, and operate core data platform capabilities in a remote US setting. You will enable data applications at scale, implement secure access, and partner across teams to improve reliability and self-service tooling.

You will work with Python and SQL on platform services, drive governance and automation, and contribute to observability, incident response, and future AI-ready tooling for the data platform