Staff Software Engineer

Affirm is reinventing credit to make it more honest and friendly, providing consumers flexibility to buy now and pay later without hidden fees or compounding interest. The Data and Storage Services team owns Affirm's data infrastructure across OLTP and OLAP systems—from critical checkout databases to analytics platforms. This Staff Backend Engineer role focuses on building and operating Affirm's Lakehouse Platform, a foundational system serving analytics, machine learning, and business intelligence across the company.

About the Role

You'll lead the technical direction and hands-on development of Affirm's Lakehouse Platform, which uses Apache Iceberg as its core technology for scalable analytical data storage and interoperability across compute engines like Spark and Snowflake. This is a high-impact position where you'll shape platform strategy, improve data governance and security, and ensure reliable operations at scale.

Responsibilities

• Define and drive the long-term technical roadmap for the Lakehouse Platform, balancing scalability, reliability, governance, performance, and cost across Apache Iceberg, Spark, Snowflake, and cloud-native storage
• Design and implement platform capabilities that make analytical data secure, trustworthy, discoverable, and user-friendly for engineering, analytics, machine learning, and business teams
• Design and operate secure, auditable data access controls including RBAC, dynamic data masking, cataloging, lineage tracking, classification, and privacy policy enforcement
• Partner with Analytics Engineering to evolve data modeling, transformation pipelines, testing frameworks, documentation standards, and data quality practices
• Establish operational best practices for lakehouse systems including schema evolution, table maintenance, partitioning, compaction, observability, incident response, and on-call readiness
• Conduct thorough technical design reviews and lead incident analysis to maintain operational excellence

Requirements

• Proven experience architecting and operating large-scale data platforms and infrastructure systems
• Deep expertise with Apache Iceberg, data lakehouse architectures, or similar table format/storage technologies
• Strong background with Spark, Snowflake, or comparable analytics and query engines
• Experience designing data governance, access control, and security frameworks for analytical systems
• Track record of leading technical strategy and influencing roadmaps at scale
• Capability to balance technical depth with cross-functional collaboration across engineering, analytics, and business teams

Location & Work Arrangement

Remote, Canada