Staff Lakehouse Platform Engineer

Affirm; Chicago (IL); On-site; USD 204,000 - 264,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health care coverage

Flexible Spending Wallets

Time off

ESPP — stock purchase plan

Job summary

Affirm is seeking a senior data platform engineer to shape and operate a scalable lakehouse platform built on Apache Iceberg, Spark, and Snowflake. You will design secure, auditable data access, and partner with analytics, ML, BI, and product teams to enable trusted self‑service analytics.

You will lead architecture initiatives, guide data modeling, testing, and CI/CD practices, and mentor engineers while driving operational excellence across a remote‑first organization.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of experience in software engineering, data infrastructure, or data platform engineering, with 2+ years of technical leadership responsibilities.
• 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

• Define and drive the long‑term technical roadmap for Affirms Lakehouse Platform across Iceberg, Spark, Snowflake, and cloud storage.
• Architect and implement platform capabilities for secure, discoverable analytics data across engineering, analytics, ML, and BI teams.
• Strengthen governance and access controls across Snowflake and lakehouse platform with RBAC, masking, cataloging, lineage, and privacy policy enforcement.
• Evolve data modeling, transformation pipelines, testing, documentation, and data quality practices with Analytics Engineering.
• Establish best practices for lakehouse operations including schema evolution, partitioning, and observability for on‑call readiness.
• Identify and execute cost and performance improvements across compute and storage (Snowflake tuning, layout, lifecycle).
• Collaborate with Infrastructure, Lakehouse Analytics, Analytics Engineering, ML, BI, Product Eng, and SRE to translate needs into durable platform architecture.
• Stay ahead of industry trends in lakehouse architecture, open table formats, and AI‑ready data infrastructure.
• Mentor engineers, raise technical quality, and foster an inclusive culture of design rigor and operational excellence.

Skills

Python

SQL

JVM-based languages

Leadership

Communication

Education

Bachelor’s degree in related field

Tools

Iceberg

Spark

Snowflake

Terraform

Job description

Affirm is seeking a senior data platform engineer to shape and operate a scalable lakehouse platform built on Apache Iceberg, Spark, and Snowflake. You will design secure, auditable data access, and partner with analytics, ML, BI, and product teams to enable trusted self‑service analytics.

You will lead architecture initiatives, guide data modeling, testing, and CI/CD practices, and mentor engineers while driving operational excellence across a remote‑first organization.