Staff Software Engineer

About the Position

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. We are seeking a Staff Software Engineer to join our team in Canada, focusing on our Lakehouse Platform using Apache Iceberg, Spark, and Snowflake.

Responsibilities

• 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.

Requirements

• 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.

Qualifications

• 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.

We Offer

• Competitive Salary: CAN base pay range per year: 181,000 - 241,000
• Health Care Coverage: Affirm covers all premiums for all levels of coverage for you and your dependents
• Flexible Spending Wallets: Generous stipends for spending on Technology, Food, various Lifestyle needs, and family forming expenses
• Time Off: Competitive vacation and holiday schedules allowing you to take time off to rest and recharge
• ESPP: An employee stock purchase plan enabling you to buy shares of Affirm at a discount

About the Company

Affirm is proud to be a remote-first company! The majority of our roles are remote and you can work almost anywhere within the country of employment. Affirmers in proximal roles have the flexibility to work remotely, but will occasionally be required to work out of their assigned Affirm office. A limited number of roles remain office-based due to the nature of their job responsibilities.

We’re extremely proud to offer competitive benefits that are anchored to our core value of people come first. Some key highlights of our benefits package include:

• Health care coverage - Affirm covers all premiums for all levels of coverage for you and your dependents
• Flexible Spending Wallets - generous stipends for spending on Technology, Food, various Lifestyle needs, and family forming expenses
• Time off - competitive vacation and holiday schedules allowing you to take time off to rest and recharge
• ESPP - An employee stock purchase plan enabling you to buy shares of Affirm at a discount

We believe It’s On Us to provide an inclusive interview experience for all, including people with disabilities. We are happy to provide reasonable accommodations to candidates in need of individualized support during the hiring process.

[For U.S. positions that could be performed in Los Angeles or San Francisco] Pursuant to the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance and Los Angeles Fair Chance Initiative for Hiring Ordinance, Affirm will consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records.

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