Staff Software Engineer, Backend (Lake Analytics Platform)

TL;DR

Staff Software Engineer (Backend/Data Platform): Architecting and scaling Affirm’s Lakehouse Platform with an accent on Apache Iceberg, Spark, and Snowflake integration. Focus on building secure, performant, and trustworthy analytical data infrastructure to support global financial products.

Location: Must be based in Canada

Salary: $181,000–$241,000 CAD per year

Company

Affirm is a fintech company reinventing credit by providing flexible, transparent buy-now-pay-later solutions without hidden fees.

What you will do

• Define and drive the long-term technical roadmap for the Lakehouse Platform, balancing scalability, reliability, and cost.
• Architect and implement platform capabilities for secure, discoverable, and trustworthy analytical data.
• Design and operate secure data access controls, including RBAC, dynamic masking, and lineage tracking.
• Partner with Analytics Engineering to evolve data modeling, transformation pipelines, and quality practices.
• Establish operational best practices for schema evolution, compaction, observability, and incident response.
• Mentor engineers and foster a culture of design rigor and operational excellence.

Requirements

• Must be based in Canada
• 8+ years of experience in software engineering or data platform engineering, including 2+ years of technical leadership.
• Proven experience architecting and operating large-scale OLAP systems or lakehouse platforms using Apache Iceberg, Spark, and Snowflake.
• Strong proficiency in Python, SQL, or JVM-based languages.
• Experience with dbt or similar transformation frameworks and data modeling best practices.
• Familiarity with Infrastructure as Code tools like Terraform.

Nice to have

• Experience building semantic layers or agentic data tools.
• Deep expertise in Snowflake cost management and query optimization.

Culture & Benefits

• 100% subsidized medical, dental, and vision coverage for employees and dependents.
• Generous flexible spending wallets for technology, food, and lifestyle needs.
• Competitive vacation and holiday schedules.
• Employee Stock Purchase Plan (ESPP) with discounted shares.
• Remote-first culture with a focus on operational excellence and continuous learning.