Senior Staff Backend Software Engineer, Affirm
Data and Storage Services
CA$206-256k
SQL
AWS
Python
Go
Kotlin
Terraform
Spark
Snowflake
dbt
Expert level
Remote from Canada
Buy-now-pay-later card for online and in-store
Be an early applicant
Buy-now-pay-later card for online and in-store
1001+ employees
FintechB2CPersonal financePaymentsSaaS
Be an early applicant
CA$206-256k
SQL
AWS
Python
Go
Kotlin
Terraform
Spark
Snowflake
dbt
Expert level
Remote from Canada
1001+ employees
FintechB2CPersonal financePaymentsSaaS
Company mission
To deliver honest and transparent financial products that improve users' lives.
Role
Who you are
- Experience: 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
- Snowflake Expertise: 6+ years of hands-on experience with Snowflake or comparable analytical data warehouses, including RBAC design, data masking, query optimization, and cost management
- Lakehouse & Big Data: Strong experience with Apache Iceberg, Spark, and cloud-native data lake architectures on AWS (S3, EKS)
- Analytics Engineering: Experience with dbt or equivalent transformation frameworks, including data modeling best practices, testing, and CI/CD for data pipelines
- Problem Solving: Exceptional problem-solving and analytical skills, with the ability to identify and resolve complex technical challenges and establish long-lasting solutions and processes
- Programming Skills: Proficiency in Python and SQL, with a strong emphasis on clean, maintainable code. Experience with Kotlin or Go is a plus
- Leadership: 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
- Innovation: 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
- Infrastructure as Code (IaC): Familiarity with automation tools like Terraform for managing data infrastructure
- Communication: Excellent communication and interpersonal skills, with the ability to clearly articulate technical ideas to both technical and non-technical audiences
What the job involves
- Affirm is reinventing credit to make it more honest and friendly, giving consumers the flexibility to buy now and pay later without any hidden fees or compounding interest
- Affirm's engineering team is building a large-scale, highly-available, and global infrastructure that is shared across multiple financial products. Ensuring that our infrastructure is accessible to all engineers is critical to the success of the business. We pride ourselves on our culture across engineering of engaging in thorough technical design review, operational excellence, and capable incident response and analysis
- The Data and Storage Services team is responsible for handling all of Affirm's Data (OLAP and OLTP) requirements and encompasses the entire range from critical online checkout databases all the way to our Batch Orchestration, Streaming Infrastructure, Event Driven Frameworks, BI and analytics tools and systems. Our mission is to provide trustworthy, intuitive, and cost-efficient solutions for Affirmers to secure, store, analyze, and transform data at exceptional scale
- The Data Services organization encompasses the Lake Analytics Platform and Analytics Engineering teams. Our platform powers Affirm's analytical data ecosystem — from the lakehouse and query infrastructure that stores and serves data at scale, to the transformation and modeling layers that make data trustworthy and accessible to the business. We are responsible for Snowflake, FiveTran, Atlan, MonteCarlo, dbt, data governance, privacy controls, and the tooling that enables self-service analytics with an AI focused mindset across the company
- As a member of the Data and Storage Services organization, you will 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
- Architect and Implement: Design, develop, and maintain core components of Affirm's lakehouse analytics platform, with a focus on scalability, governance, and reliability
- Snowflake Expertise: Leverage deep knowledge of Snowflake to architect RBAC models, dynamic data masking, warehouse optimization, and multi-cluster compute strategies. Should possess deep understanding of Snowflake internals including query profiling, micro-partitioning, clustering, materialized views, and cost attribution
- Analytics Engineering: Drive the technical strategy for data modeling and transformation using dbt, including testing frameworks, documentation standards, and CI/CD for data pipelines
- Data Governance & Privacy: Design and operate data governance frameworks using tools like Atlan, including data cataloging, lineage tracking, classification, and automated privacy policy enforcement
- Lakehouse Architecture: Tackle the challenges of large-scale analytical data systems, including Apache Iceberg table management, schema evolution, storage optimization, and integration with Spark and Snowflake
- Collaboration: Work closely with product managers, software engineers and analysts to translate business requirements into technical solutions, and with fellow engineers to deliver high-quality data infrastructure
- Mentorship: Guide and mentor junior and senior engineers, sharing your expertise and fostering a culture of technical excellence
- Innovation: Stay ahead of the curve by researching and experimenting with emerging technologies and trends in the lakehouse, data governance, and analytics engineering space
Our take
Affirm offers point-of-sale loans to consumers, working with merchants like Shopify, KAYAK, and Walmart. Buy now, pay later transactions have grown in popularity in recent years, and this business is tapping into the market with a totally different approach to credit - by delivering the Affirm card, the first US debit card with the option to pay-over-time.
Serving over 21 million consumers and over 300,000 merchants, the company offers flexible payback options ranging from 3 to 36 months. The interest rates run between 0% and 30%, so, while they are not necessarily the cheapest option, Affirm prides itself on having no fees for late payments, no hidden charges, and total transparency about what people will pay before they take out a loan.
Affirm collects payments from the customers and pays the merchants directly, shouldering the risk itself. The company has boosted its market share, expanding its availability beyond the US to include most of Canada, and continues to launch new features and create new partnerships towards bettering its offering.
Kirsty
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
Top investors
-11% employee growth in 12 months
Company
Funding (last 2 of 5 rounds)
Sep 2020
$500m
SERIES G
Apr 2019
$300m
SERIES F
Total funding: $1.1bn
Company benefits
- Compensation: We have a simple, flexible, and transparent remote-first compensation structure so you can make the best decisions for yourself and your family
- Spending Wallets: Access tech, food, lifestyle, and family planning wallets for your expenses
- Supportive Communities: Get involved with our employee resource groups and community groups
- Remote-first Workforce: If your role is remote, you can set up shop anywhere in your home country
- Generous Time Off: Take the time you need when life happens
- Health Benefits: Get a plan that fits your needs
- Mental Healthcare: Take care of your mind with great mental health programs
- Parental Leave: Birth and non-birth parents get 18 weeks’ paid leave. Plus, a 4-week return-to-work transition program, at full base pay
- Away Days: We offer 20 company-wide paid days off—which help our teams collectively pause to recharge
- Learning & Development: Engage in exciting learning programs to level up your growth
Company HQ
Chinatown, San Francisco, CA
Leadership
Max Levchin
(Co-Founder & CEO)Has founded/co-founded numerous companies, holding various executive positions at each, including Paypal, Slide, Glow, HVF Labs, and SciFi VC. Also worked at large brands including Google, Yelp, Yahoo, and Evernote.
Share this job
View 125 more jobs at Affirm