Staff Backend Engineer — Lakehouse Platform

Affirm; United States; Remote; USD 204,000 - 290,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health coverage

Equity compensation

Flexible Spending Wallets

Job summary

Affirm is seeking a Staff Software Engineer, Backend (Lake Analytics Platform) to design, build, and operate a lakehouse platform with Iceberg, Spark, and Snowflake. This remote US role requires leadership across data infrastructure and analytics teams, focusing on scalable data storage, governance, and reliable pipelines.

You will mentor engineers, shape technical strategy, and ensure cost-efficient performance while collaborating with cross-functional partners.

Qualifications

• 8+ years in software engineering or data infrastructure with leadership responsibilities.
• Hands-on experience with Snowflake or comparable analytical warehouses including access control and cost management.
• Strong knowledge of lakehouse architectures, Iceberg, Spark, and cloud-native data lake designs.
• Experience with dbt or similar transformation frameworks and CI/CD practices.
• Proficiency in Python, SQL, or JVM-based languages for production-grade systems.
• Familiarity with data governance, RBAC/ABAC, and data quality practices.

Responsibilities

• Define and drive the long-term technical roadmap for the Lake Analytics Platform, balancing scalability, governance, and cost.
• Architect and implement platform capabilities for secure, discoverable analytics across multiple teams.
• Design and operate secure, auditable data access controls and lineage across Snowflake and lakehouse components.
• Partner with Analytics Engineering to evolve data modeling, pipelines, testing, and documentation.
• Establish best practices for lakehouse operations, including partitioning, schema evolution, and observability.
• Identify and execute performance and cost optimizations across compute and storage.
• Collaborate with Infrastructure, ML, BI, and Product Engineering to translate needs into durable platform solutions.
• Mentor engineers and foster an inclusive culture of design rigor and operational excellence.

Skills

Lakehouse Platform

Snowflake

Iceberg

Spark

dbt

Terraform

Python/SQL/JVM

Technical Leadership

Collaboration

Communication

Education

Bachelor's degree or equivalent

Tools

Snowflake

Apache Iceberg

Spark

dbt

Terraform

Job description

Affirm is seeking a Staff Software Engineer, Backend (Lake Analytics Platform) to design, build, and operate a lakehouse platform with Iceberg, Spark, and Snowflake. This remote US role requires leadership across data infrastructure and analytics teams, focusing on scalable data storage, governance, and reliable pipelines.

You will mentor engineers, shape technical strategy, and ensure cost-efficient performance while collaborating with cross-functional partners.