Senior Data Platform Engineer - Self-Service & Reliability

Affirm; Chicago (IL); 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 building a scalable data platform to support its checkout and analytics workloads. This role focuses on the platform and applications layer—building, operating, and extending systems that enable teams to work with data at scale.

You will strengthen reliability, observability, governance, and self‑service capabilities, contribute to the semantic layer and AI‑ready tooling, and help design the next generation of data infrastructure.

Qualifications

• Hands-on experience operating a cloud analytical data platform with governance and cost optimization.
• Experience with containerized apps, CI/CD, and deployment automation.
• Experience building internal platforms or self-service infrastructure.
• Familiarity with REST APIs, OAuth/OIDC, secrets management, and identity patterns.
• Proficiency in Python and SQL for platform services.
• Strong operational instincts and on-call ownership.

Responsibilities

• Design and implement platform features for data applications at scale.
• Build and maintain integrations between the platform and internal systems.
• Design secure data access patterns and governance across analytical infrastructure.
• Automate toil and build self-service tooling for platform users.
• Improve observability, telemetry, and incident response.

Skills

Data platform depth

Container deployment

Developer tooling

Integrations networking

Backend fundamentals

Operational ownership

AI-ready tools

Communication collaboration

Bachelor's degree

Education

Bachelor's degree

Tools

Snowflake

Databricks

BigQuery

Job description

Affirm is building a scalable data platform to support its checkout and analytics workloads. This role focuses on the platform and applications layer—building, operating, and extending systems that enable teams to work with data at scale.

You will strengthen reliability, observability, governance, and self‑service capabilities, contribute to the semantic layer and AI‑ready tooling, and help design the next generation of data infrastructure.