Senior Software Engineer, Backend (Lakehouse Infra)

Affirm

11h•$173,000 - $255,000•Remote

About The Position

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. Our mission is to provide trustworthy, intuitive, and cost-efficient solutions for Affirmers to secure, store, analyze, and transform data at exceptional scale. The vision for the Lakehouse Infra team is to provide reliable, scalable, self-serve and Affirm-optimized offline data access to enable ML, Product, and Financial Engineering success. Our team is responsible for hosting the data infrastructure that serves as a backbone for processing various business critical money and loan movement workloads at Affirm across our batch and analytics ecosystems. Affirm is growing rapidly and so is the need for reliable and high availability frameworks. If solving data lake challenges at scale excites you, come join us!

Requirements

4+ years of experience designing, developing and launching backend systems at scale using languages like Python or Kotlin.
A track record of developing highly available distributed systems using technologies like AWS, MySQL, and Kubernetes.
Experience scaling relevant technologies such as Iceberg, Flink, Airflow, Spark, Kafka, Snowflake, and Terraform.
Experience defining a technical plan for the delivery of a significant feature or system component with an elegant, simple and extensible design.
Writing high quality code that is easily understood and used by others.
Proficiency at making significant changes in a large code base, and have developed a suite of tools and practices that enable you and your team to do so safely.
Experience demonstrates that you take ownership of your growth, proactively seeking feedback from your team, your manager, and your stakeholders.
Strong verbal and written communication skills that support effective collaboration with our global engineering team.
Equivalent practical experience or a Bachelor’s degree in a related field.

Responsibilities

Owning and delivering quarterly goals for your team.
Leading engineers on your team through ambiguity to solve open-ended problems, and ensuring that everyone is supported throughout delivery.
Supporting your peers and stakeholders in the product development lifecycle by collaborating with product management, design & analytics by participating in ideation, articulating technical constraints, and partnering on decisions that properly consider risks and trade-offs.
Proactively identifying project, process, technology or business issues, advocating for them, and leading in solving them.
Supporting the operations and availability of your team’s artifacts by creating and monitoring metrics, escalating when needed, and supporting “keep the lights on” & on-call efforts.
Fostering a culture of quality and ownership on your team by setting or improving code review and design standards for your team, and advocating for them beyond your team through your writing and tech talks.
Helping develop talent on your team by providing feedback and guidance, and leading by example.