Senior Staff Software Engineer, Backend (Data and Storage Services)

Affirm is reinventing credit to make it more honest and friendly, and they are seeking a Senior Staff Software Engineer in Backend for their Data and Storage Services team. The role involves architecting and evolving Affirm's lakehouse analytics platform, ensuring data security and compliance, and leading analytics engineering practices.

Responsibilities:

• 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
• This position requires either equivalent practical experience or a Bachelor's degree in a related field