Senior Software Engineer, Backend (Lake Analytics Platform)

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. This role focuses on building and operating core platform capabilities for Affirm's data infrastructure, enabling teams to work with data at scale while also enhancing platform reliability and self-service capabilities.

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
• 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
• 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

Requirements:

• Hands-on 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
• Experience building internal platforms, developer tooling, or self-service infrastructure that makes other engineers more productive
• 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
• Proficiency in Python and SQL for building reliable, maintainable platform services
• Strong operational instincts — you instrument your systems, write runbooks, own your alerts, and treat on-call burden as a design constraint from day one
• Familiarity with or interest in semantic layer design, LLM-integrated platform workflows, and agentic data tools
• Strong written and verbal communication
• This position requires either equivalent practical experience or a Bachelor's degree in a related field