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Senior Staff Software Engineer, Backend, Data and Storage Services

at Affirm

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About the role

  • Senior Staff Software Engineer collaborating with teams to build scalable analytical infrastructure for Affirm. Driving data governance and mentoring engineers for technical excellence.

Responsibilities

  • Collaborate with other teams — including Product, Infrastructure, Lakehouse Infra, Lakehouse Analytics and Analytics Engineering to architect and evolve Affirm's lakehouse analytics platform, driving strategy around Snowflake, Apache Iceberg, and Spark to deliver scalable, high-performance analytical infrastructure.
  • Design and implement robust Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) and dynamic data masking policies in Snowflake, ensuring data access is secure, compliant, and auditable across the organization.
  • Lead the technical direction of analytics engineering practices, including data modeling, transformation pipelines (dbt), and data quality frameworks that enable trustworthy, self-service analytics.
  • Drive data governance and privacy engineering initiatives, leveraging tools like Atlan to manage data cataloging, lineage, classification, and policy enforcement.
  • Identify and execute cost optimization strategies across Affirm's analytical compute and storage footprint, including Snowflake warehouse tuning, query optimization, and efficient data lifecycle management.
  • Collaborate with product engineering, data science, and business intelligence teams to understand their data needs and provide continuous guidance on design, architecture, and best practices.
  • Establish and champion best practices for lakehouse operations at scale, including schema evolution, table maintenance, partitioning strategies, and observability.
  • Stay ahead of industry trends in analytical data platforms, data governance, and privacy technologies, and identify opportunities to innovate and improve our data offerings.
  • Mentor engineers across the Lake Analytics Platform and Analytics Engineering teams, providing guidance on emerging technologies, development practices, and fostering a culture of technical excellence.
  • Participate in an on-call rotation and collaborate with other teams such as SRE to resolve production issues.

Requirements

  • 10+ years of experience in software engineering or data engineering, with a proven track record of delivering complex data platform solutions that improve accessibility, performance, and governance of analytics infrastructure.
  • 6+ years of hands-on experience with Snowflake or comparable analytical data warehouses, including RBAC design, data masking, query optimization, and cost management.
  • Strong experience with Apache Iceberg, Spark, and cloud-native data lake architectures on AWS (S3, EKS).
  • Experience with dbt or equivalent transformation frameworks, including data modeling best practices, testing, and CI/CD for data pipelines.
  • Exceptional problem-solving and analytical skills, with the ability to identify and resolve complex technical challenges and establish long-lasting solutions and processes.
  • Proficiency in Python and SQL, with a strong emphasis on clean, maintainable code. Experience with Kotlin or Go is a plus.
  • Demonstrated leadership and mentorship skills, with the ability to inspire and guide others. You can also work cross-functionally addressing technical challenges and influencing roadmaps outside your direct area of ownership.
  • You drive innovation in the platforms you build and operate, and have experience contributing to open-source projects. You are passionate about engaging with the data engineering community.
  • Familiarity with automation tools like Terraform for managing data infrastructure.
  • Excellent communication and interpersonal skills, with the ability to clearly articulate technical ideas to both technical and non-technical audiences.

Benefits

  • Health care coverage - Affirm covers all premiums for all levels of coverage for you and your dependents
  • Flexible Spending Wallets - generous stipends for spending on Technology, Food, various Lifestyle needs, and family forming expenses
  • Time off - competitive vacation and holiday schedules allowing you to take time off to rest and recharge
  • ESPP - An employee stock purchase plan enabling you to buy shares of Affirm at a discount

Job title

Backend Engineer

Job type

Full Time

Experience level

Senior

Salary

CA$206,000 - CA$256,000 per year

Degree requirement

Bachelor's Degree

Tech skills

ApacheAWSCloudKotlinPythonSparkSQLTerraformGo

Location requirements

RemoteCanada

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