Staff Software Engineer - Lakehouse Platform (Iceberg/Spark)

Affirm; Nashville (TN); On-site; USD 204,000 - 264,000; 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 lead the Lakehouse Platform strategy and implementation. You will architect, build, and operate scalable analytical data infrastructure leveraging Iceberg, Spark, and Snowflake across the organization.

You will collaborate with engineering, analytics, ML, BI, and product teams to deliver secure, observable, and cost-efficient data solutions, while mentoring engineers and promoting operational excellence.

Qualifications

• Lakehouse Platform: architecting, building, launching, and operating large-scale OLAP systems, lakehouse platforms, or analytical data infrastructure.
• Snowflake/Analytical Warehouses: hands-on experience with Snowflake or comparable data warehouses, including access control, data masking, query optimization, and cost management.
• Data Platform Architecture: strong understanding of table formats, schema evolution, partitioning, compaction, query performance, data lifecycle management, observability, and cost optimization.
• Governance and Trust: designing secure, reliable, and governed data platforms with RBAC/ABAC, data quality, lineage, privacy controls, policy enforcement, and compliance.
• Analytics Engineering: experience with dbt or similar transformation frameworks, data modeling, testing, documentation, CI/CD, and data quality practices.
• Agentic Data Tools: experience building semantic layers, self-service analytics platforms, or AI-enabled data tools.
• Technical Leadership: setting technical direction, leading platform initiatives, mentoring engineers, and influencing roadmaps.
• Collaboration: partnering with engineering, analytics, ML, BI, product, and infrastructure teams to translate needs into durable solutions.
• Communication Skills: ability to articulate technical concepts clearly to technical and non-technical stakeholders.

Responsibilities

• Influence technical strategy: define and drive long-term roadmap for Affirms Lakehouse Platform across Iceberg, Spark, Snowflake, and cloud storage.
• Design and develop: build platform capabilities to secure, discoverable, and usable analytics data across teams.
• Strengthen governance and access controls: implement secure, auditable data access, RBAC, data masking, cataloging, lineage, and privacy policy enforcement.
• Improve analytics engineering foundations: partner to evolve data modeling, transformation pipelines, testing, and data quality practices.
• Operate at scale: establish best practices for lakehouse operations including schema evolution, partitioning, and on‑call readiness.
• Optimize performance and cost: tune Snowflake warehouses, data layout, lifecycle management, and cost attribution.
• Collaborate cross‑functionally: work with Infra, Lakehouse Analytics, Analytics Eng, ML, BI, Product, and SRE.
• Innovate: stay ahead of trends in lakehouse architecture, open table formats, analytics engines, governance, and semantic layers.
• Build teams: mentor engineers and foster an inclusive culture of design rigor and operational excellence.

Skills

Lakehouse Platform

Snowflake Platform

Data Platform Architecture

Governance and Trust

Analytics Engineering Foundations

Agentic Data Tools

Technical Leadership

Collaboration

Communication Skills

Education

Bachelor’s degree in related field

Tools

dbt

Terraform

Python

SQL

Job description

Affirm is seeking a senior data platform engineer to lead the Lakehouse Platform strategy and implementation. You will architect, build, and operate scalable analytical data infrastructure leveraging Iceberg, Spark, and Snowflake across the organization.

You will collaborate with engineering, analytics, ML, BI, and product teams to deliver secure, observable, and cost-efficient data solutions, while mentoring engineers and promoting operational excellence.