data
Posted 5 days agoSenior Software Engineer, Backend (Lake Analytics Platform)
at Affirm
CanadaRemote
Responsibilities
- Build and operate core platform capabilities: Design and implement platform features that enable engineers across Affirm to build, deploy, and operate data applications at scale — covering automated provisioning, deploy pipelines, access control, service lifecycle management, and reliability tooling.
- Develop integrations: Build and maintain integrations between the platform and internal systems — CI/CD pipelines, identity and secrets management, external APIs, and event-driven hooks — so that application teams have secure, reliable, and self-service access to the tools they need.
- Strengthen data access and governance: Design and operate secure data access patterns across the platform's analytical infrastructure, including RBAC, managed-access schemas, dynamic data masking, secure views, and cross-database grants that make platform data trustworthy without creating operational bottlenecks.
- Automate toil and unlock self-service: Identify recurring support patterns — access provisioning, data pipeline failures, service health management, secrets management — and build the automation and tooling to make them self-service for platform users, eliminating manual admin work.
- Improve observability and incident response: Build telemetry, alerting, and log infrastructure so platform teams and application owners can diagnose and resolve issues independently.
- Establish runbooks and operational patterns that reduce blast radius and recovery time.
- Support platform operations: Participate in on-call coverage, triage production incidents across platform services and the applications that run on them, and execute platform-level maintenance with care for the engineers and workflows that depend on the platform.
Requirements
- 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.
- Contribute to the emerging platform roadmap: Help design and build next-generation platform capabilities — semantic layer infrastructure, agentic application patterns, and AI-native data tooling — as the platform grows to support Affirm's most ambitious data use cases.
- experience operating a cloud analytical data platform (e.g., Snowflake, Databricks, BigQuery, or similar), including access control design, data masking and governance, compute management, and cost optimization.
- Experience building and operating containerized applications — Docker image management, CI/CD pipeline design (Buildkite, GitHub Actions, or similar), deployment automation, and rollout practices for production services.
- Backend Engineering Fundamentals: Proficiency in Python and SQL for building reliable, maintainable platform services. You write code that your teammates can own, not just code that works today.
- Agentic and AI-Ready Data Tools: Familiarity with or interest in semantic layer design, LLM-integrated platform workflows, and agentic data tools.
- Curiosity about where data infrastructure and AI tooling intersect matters here.
- Affirmers in proximal roles have the flexibility to work remotely, but will occasionally be required to work out of their assigned Affirm office.
Benefits
- You're effective working across application teams, security, infrastructure, and platform users to scope, prioritize, and deliver — especially when requirements are ambiguous. Pay Grade - N Equity Grade - 6
- Employees new to Affirm typically come in at the start of the pay range. Affirm focuses on providing a simple and transparent pay structure which is based on a variety of factors, including location, experience and job-related skills.
- Base pay is part of a total compensation package that may include equity rewards, monthly stipends for health, wellness and tech spending, and
- benefits (including 100% subsidized medical coverage, dental and vision for you and your dependents.)
- CAN base pay range per year: $ 153,000 - 213,000
- 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
Additional details
- 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.
- 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 focuses on the platform and applications layer of Affirm's data infrastructure — building, operating, and extending systems that enable teams across Affirm to work with data at scale.
- You will be a core contributor to platform reliability, self-service capabilities, and the roadmap toward agentic data tooling and semantic layer infrastructure. What You'll Do
- Raise the engineering bar: Set and hold high standards in code review, design, operational readiness, and incident follow-through.
- Help establish patterns that other contributors can follow and build on. What We Look For
- You're comfortable operating with elevated privileges and understand the governance and blast-radius implications of each action.
- Experience building internal platforms, developer tooling, or self-service infrastructure that makes other engineers more productive. You design for the developer
- Integrations and Networking: Comfort building integrations between systems — REST APIs, OAuth/OIDC, webhook ingestion, secrets management, egress networking configuration, and identity/SSO patterns in a managed cloud environment.
- Operational Ownership: Strong operational instincts — you instrument your systems, write runbooks, own your alerts, and treat on-call burden as a design constraint from day one.