Staff Backend Software Engineer, Affirm
Lake Analytics Platform
CA$181-241k
+ An employee stock purchase plan enabling you to buy shares of Affirm at a discount
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
Be an early applicant
CA$181-241k
+ An employee stock purchase plan enabling you to buy shares of Affirm at a discount
1001+ employees
Company mission
To deliver honest and transparent financial products that improve users' lives.
Role
Who you are
- Lakehouse Platform Expertise: Proven experience architecting, building, launching, and operating large-scale OLAP systems, lakehouse platforms, or analytical data infrastructure using technologies such as Apache Iceberg, Spark, Snowflake, and cloud-native storage
- Snowflake Platform Expertise: Hands-on experience with Snowflake or comparable analytical data warehouses, including RBAC, dynamic data masking, warehouse optimization, query profiling, clustering, and cost management
- Data Platform Architecture: Strong understanding of table formats, schema evolution, partitioning, compaction, query performance, data lifecycle management, observability, and cost optimization for analytical systems
- Governance and Trust: Experience designing secure, reliable, and governed data platforms, including RBAC/ABAC, data quality, lineage, classification, privacy controls, policy enforcement, and operational compliance
- Analytics Engineering Foundations: Experience with dbt or similar transformation frameworks, data modeling best practices, testing, documentation, CI/CD, and data quality practices for analytical pipelines
- Agentic Data Tools: Experience building or shaping semantic layers, self-service analytics platforms, internal data applications, or AI-enabled data tools that improve data accessibility and usability
- Technical Leadership: Demonstrated ability to set technical direction, lead ambiguous platform initiatives, mentor engineers, and influence roadmaps across teams while staying close to implementation details
- Collaboration: Strong ability to partner with engineering, analytics, machine learning, BI, product, and infrastructure teams to translate business needs into durable technical solutions
- Communication Skills: Excellent communication skills, with the ability to clearly articulate technical concepts, tradeoffs, and recommendations to technical and non-technical stakeholders
- Experience: 8+ years of experience in software engineering, data infrastructure, or data platform engineering, with 2+ years of technical leadership responsibilities
- Hands-on Leadership: 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
What the job involves
- 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 Affirm’s data infrastructure across OLTP and OLAP systems, spanning critical online checkout databases, batch orchestration, streaming infrastructure, event-driven frameworks, BI, analytics tooling, large-scale data platforms, and agentic data tools such as semantic layers and internal platform data applications
- Our mission is to provide trustworthy, intuitive, and cost-efficient solutions for Affirmers to secure, store, analyze, and transform data at exceptional scale
- This role will focus on Affirm’s Lakehouse Platform, including Apache Iceberg as a foundational technology for scalable analytical data storage, table management, schema evolution, and interoperability across compute engines such as Spark and Snowflake
- Influence technical strategy: Define and drive the long-term technical roadmap for Affirm’s Lakehouse Platform across Apache Iceberg, Spark, Snowflake, and cloud-native storage, balancing scalability, reliability, governance, performance, and cost
- Design and develop: Architect and implement platform capabilities that make analytical data secure, trustworthy, discoverable, and easy to use across Affirm’s engineering, analytics, machine learning, and business teams
- Strengthen governance and access controls: Design and operate secure, auditable data access capabilities across Snowflake and the lakehouse platform, including RBAC, dynamic data masking, cataloging, lineage, classification, and privacy policy enforcement
- Improve analytics engineering foundations: Partner with Analytics Engineering to evolve data modeling, transformation pipelines, testing frameworks, documentation standards, and data quality practices that enable trustworthy self-service analytics
- Operate at scale: Establish best practices for lakehouse operations, including schema evolution, table maintenance, partitioning, compaction, observability, incident response, production support, and readiness for on-call operations
- Optimize performance and cost: Identify and execute improvements across analytical compute and storage, including Snowflake warehouse tuning, query optimization, storage layout, lifecycle management, cost attribution, and operational efficiency
- Collaborate cross-functionally: Partner with Infrastructure, Lakehouse Analytics, Analytics Engineering, Machine Learning, BI, Product Engineering, and SRE to translate stakeholder needs into durable platform architecture
- Innovate: Stay ahead of industry trends in lakehouse architecture, open table formats, analytical compute engines, data governance, privacy engineering, semantic layers, agentic data tools, and AI-ready data infrastructure
- Build teams: Mentor engineers, raise technical quality, and foster an inclusive culture of design rigor, operational excellence, and continuous learning
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
-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.
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