Staff Software Engineer, Backend (Lake Analytics Platform)

What You’ll Do

• 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.

What We Look For

• ...