Senior Data Platform Engineer: Scale, Automation, AI Tools

Affirm; Pittsburgh (Allegheny County); On-site; USD 173,000 - 255,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health care coverage

Flexible Spending Wallets

Time off

ESPP

Job summary

Affirm is seeking a senior data platform engineer to design, build, and operate scalable data infrastructure across OLTP/OLAP systems. You will enable self-service data tooling, secure access patterns, and reliable data pipelines in a remote-first environment.

The role emphasizes platform reliability, observability, and governance while collaborating with security, infra, and analytics teams. Strong Python/SQL skills and experience with cloud data platforms are required.

Qualifications

• Hands-on experience operating a cloud analytical data platform (e.g., Snowflake, Databricks, BigQuery) including access control, data masking, governance, and cost optimization.
• Experience building and operating containerized apps with Docker and CI/CD pipelines in production.
• Proven ability to design internal platforms and developer tooling for self-service infrastructure.

Responsibilities

• Design and operate core platform capabilities to enable data apps at scale with automated provisioning and governance.
• Build and maintain integrations with CI/CD pipelines, identity management, APIs, and event-driven hooks.
• Enhance data access governance with RBAC, dynamic masking, secure views, and cross-database access controls.
• Identify toil and build self-service tooling for provisioning, failures, and operational incidents.
• Improve observability, telemetry, alerts, and runbooks to reduce blast radius and MTTR.
• Participate in on-call coverage and platform-level maintenance with care for user workflows.
• Contribute to roadmap for semantic layer, AI-native data tooling, and agentic data patterns.
• Set high standards in code reviews, design, and operational readiness.

Skills

Data platform

Snowflake

Databricks

BigQuery

Python

SQL

CI/CD

Docker

GitHub Actions

Security & governance

Education

Bachelor's degree

Related field

Tools

Buildkite

GitHub Actions

Job description

Affirm is seeking a senior data platform engineer to design, build, and operate scalable data infrastructure across OLTP/OLAP systems. You will enable self-service data tooling, secure access patterns, and reliable data pipelines in a remote-first environment.

The role emphasizes platform reliability, observability, and governance while collaborating with security, infra, and analytics teams. Strong Python/SQL skills and experience with cloud data platforms are required.