Senior Staff Data Engineer Jobs at Affirm with Visa Sponsorship
Senior Staff Data Engineer jobs at Affirm involve building and scaling the financial infrastructure powering its buy-now-pay-later platform. The company has a consistent record of sponsoring work visas for engineering talent at this level, including H-1B visa, OPT, and permanent residence pathways.
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Get Access To All JobsINTRODUCTION
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.
Affirm's engineering team is building a large-scale, highly-available, and global infrastructure that is shared across multiple financial products. Ensuring that our infrastructure is accessible to all engineers is critical to the success of the business. We pride ourselves on our culture across engineering of engaging in thorough technical design review, operational excellence, and capable incident response and analysis.
The Data and Storage Services team is responsible for handling all of Affirm's Data (OLAP and OLTP) requirements and encompasses the entire range from critical online checkout databases all the way to our Batch Orchestration, Streaming Infrastructure, Event Driven Frameworks, BI and analytics tools and systems. Our mission is to provide trustworthy, intuitive, and cost-efficient solutions for Affirmers to secure, store, analyze, and transform data at exceptional scale.
The Data Services organization encompasses the Lake Analytics Platform and Analytics Engineering teams. Our platform powers Affirm's analytical data ecosystem — from the lakehouse and query infrastructure that stores and serves data at scale, to the transformation and modeling layers that make data trustworthy and accessible to the business. We are responsible for Snowflake, FiveTran, Atlan, MonteCarlo, dbt, data governance, privacy controls, and the tooling that enables self-service analytics with an AI focused mindset across the company.
ROLE AND RESPONSIBILITIES
As a member of the Data and Storage Services organization, you will collaborate with other teams — including Product, Infrastructure, Lakehouse Infra, Lakehouse Analytics and Analytics Engineering to:
- Architect and evolve Affirm's lakehouse analytics platform, driving strategy around Snowflake, Apache Iceberg, and Spark to deliver scalable, high-performance analytical infrastructure.
- Design and implement robust Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) and dynamic data masking policies in Snowflake, ensuring data access is secure, compliant, and auditable across the organization.
- Lead the technical direction of analytics engineering practices, including data modeling, transformation pipelines (dbt), and data quality frameworks that enable trustworthy, self-service analytics.
- Drive data governance and privacy engineering initiatives, leveraging tools like Atlan to manage data cataloging, lineage, classification, and policy enforcement.
- Identify and execute cost optimization strategies across Affirm's analytical compute and storage footprint, including Snowflake warehouse tuning, query optimization, and efficient data lifecycle management.
- Collaborate with product engineering, data science, and business intelligence teams to understand their data needs and provide continuous guidance on design, architecture, and best practices.
- Establish and champion best practices for lakehouse operations at scale, including schema evolution, table maintenance, partitioning strategies, and observability.
- Stay ahead of industry trends in analytical data platforms, data governance, and privacy technologies, and identify opportunities to innovate and improve our data offerings.
- Mentor engineers across the Lake Analytics Platform and Analytics Engineering teams, providing guidance on emerging technologies, development practices, and fostering a culture of technical excellence.
- Participate in an on-call rotation and collaborate with other teams such as SRE to resolve production issues.
BASIC QUALIFICATIONS
- Experience: 10+ years of experience in software engineering or data engineering, with a proven track record of delivering complex data platform solutions that improve accessibility, performance, and governance of analytics infrastructure.
- Snowflake Expertise: 6+ years of hands-on experience with Snowflake or comparable analytical data warehouses, including RBAC design, data masking, query optimization, and cost management.
- Lakehouse & Big Data: Strong experience with Apache Iceberg, Spark, and cloud-native data lake architectures on AWS (S3, EKS).
- Analytics Engineering: Experience with dbt or equivalent transformation frameworks, including data modeling best practices, testing, and CI/CD for data pipelines.
- Problem Solving: Exceptional problem-solving and analytical skills, with the ability to identify and resolve complex technical challenges and establish long-lasting solutions and processes.
- Programming Skills: Proficiency in Python and SQL, with a strong emphasis on clean, maintainable code. Experience with Kotlin or Go is a plus.
- Leadership: Demonstrated leadership and mentorship skills, with the ability to inspire and guide others. You can also work cross-functionally addressing technical challenges and influencing roadmaps outside your direct area of ownership.
- Innovation: You drive innovation in the platforms you build and operate, and have experience contributing to open-source projects. You are passionate about engaging with the data engineering community.
- Infrastructure as Code (IaC): Familiarity with automation tools like Terraform for managing data infrastructure.
- Communication: Excellent communication and interpersonal skills, with the ability to clearly articulate technical ideas to both technical and non-technical audiences.
- This position requires either equivalent practical experience or a Bachelor's degree in a related field.
COMPENSATION
- Pay Grade - R
- Equity Grade - 15
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.)
USA base pay range (CA, WA, NY, NJ, CT) per year: $260,000 - 310,000
USA base pay range (all other U.S. states) per year: $232,000 - 282,000
LI-Remote
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.
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.
By clicking "Submit Application," you acknowledge that you have read Affirm's Global Candidate Privacy Notice and hereby freely and unambiguously give informed consent to the collection, processing, use, and storage of your personal information as described therein.
INTRODUCTION
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.
Affirm's engineering team is building a large-scale, highly-available, and global infrastructure that is shared across multiple financial products. Ensuring that our infrastructure is accessible to all engineers is critical to the success of the business. We pride ourselves on our culture across engineering of engaging in thorough technical design review, operational excellence, and capable incident response and analysis.
The Data and Storage Services team is responsible for handling all of Affirm's Data (OLAP and OLTP) requirements and encompasses the entire range from critical online checkout databases all the way to our Batch Orchestration, Streaming Infrastructure, Event Driven Frameworks, BI and analytics tools and systems. Our mission is to provide trustworthy, intuitive, and cost-efficient solutions for Affirmers to secure, store, analyze, and transform data at exceptional scale.
The Data Services organization encompasses the Lake Analytics Platform and Analytics Engineering teams. Our platform powers Affirm's analytical data ecosystem — from the lakehouse and query infrastructure that stores and serves data at scale, to the transformation and modeling layers that make data trustworthy and accessible to the business. We are responsible for Snowflake, FiveTran, Atlan, MonteCarlo, dbt, data governance, privacy controls, and the tooling that enables self-service analytics with an AI focused mindset across the company.
ROLE AND RESPONSIBILITIES
As a member of the Data and Storage Services organization, you will collaborate with other teams — including Product, Infrastructure, Lakehouse Infra, Lakehouse Analytics and Analytics Engineering to:
- Architect and evolve Affirm's lakehouse analytics platform, driving strategy around Snowflake, Apache Iceberg, and Spark to deliver scalable, high-performance analytical infrastructure.
- Design and implement robust Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) and dynamic data masking policies in Snowflake, ensuring data access is secure, compliant, and auditable across the organization.
- Lead the technical direction of analytics engineering practices, including data modeling, transformation pipelines (dbt), and data quality frameworks that enable trustworthy, self-service analytics.
- Drive data governance and privacy engineering initiatives, leveraging tools like Atlan to manage data cataloging, lineage, classification, and policy enforcement.
- Identify and execute cost optimization strategies across Affirm's analytical compute and storage footprint, including Snowflake warehouse tuning, query optimization, and efficient data lifecycle management.
- Collaborate with product engineering, data science, and business intelligence teams to understand their data needs and provide continuous guidance on design, architecture, and best practices.
- Establish and champion best practices for lakehouse operations at scale, including schema evolution, table maintenance, partitioning strategies, and observability.
- Stay ahead of industry trends in analytical data platforms, data governance, and privacy technologies, and identify opportunities to innovate and improve our data offerings.
- Mentor engineers across the Lake Analytics Platform and Analytics Engineering teams, providing guidance on emerging technologies, development practices, and fostering a culture of technical excellence.
- Participate in an on-call rotation and collaborate with other teams such as SRE to resolve production issues.
BASIC QUALIFICATIONS
- Experience: 10+ years of experience in software engineering or data engineering, with a proven track record of delivering complex data platform solutions that improve accessibility, performance, and governance of analytics infrastructure.
- Snowflake Expertise: 6+ years of hands-on experience with Snowflake or comparable analytical data warehouses, including RBAC design, data masking, query optimization, and cost management.
- Lakehouse & Big Data: Strong experience with Apache Iceberg, Spark, and cloud-native data lake architectures on AWS (S3, EKS).
- Analytics Engineering: Experience with dbt or equivalent transformation frameworks, including data modeling best practices, testing, and CI/CD for data pipelines.
- Problem Solving: Exceptional problem-solving and analytical skills, with the ability to identify and resolve complex technical challenges and establish long-lasting solutions and processes.
- Programming Skills: Proficiency in Python and SQL, with a strong emphasis on clean, maintainable code. Experience with Kotlin or Go is a plus.
- Leadership: Demonstrated leadership and mentorship skills, with the ability to inspire and guide others. You can also work cross-functionally addressing technical challenges and influencing roadmaps outside your direct area of ownership.
- Innovation: You drive innovation in the platforms you build and operate, and have experience contributing to open-source projects. You are passionate about engaging with the data engineering community.
- Infrastructure as Code (IaC): Familiarity with automation tools like Terraform for managing data infrastructure.
- Communication: Excellent communication and interpersonal skills, with the ability to clearly articulate technical ideas to both technical and non-technical audiences.
- This position requires either equivalent practical experience or a Bachelor's degree in a related field.
COMPENSATION
- Pay Grade - R
- Equity Grade - 15
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.)
USA base pay range (CA, WA, NY, NJ, CT) per year: $260,000 - 310,000
USA base pay range (all other U.S. states) per year: $232,000 - 282,000
LI-Remote
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.
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.
By clicking "Submit Application," you acknowledge that you have read Affirm's Global Candidate Privacy Notice and hereby freely and unambiguously give informed consent to the collection, processing, use, and storage of your personal information as described therein.
See all Senior Staff Data Engineer Jobs at Affirm
Sign up for free to unlock all listings, filter by visa type, and get alerts for new Senior Staff Data Engineer Jobs at Affirm.
Get Access To All JobsTips for Finding Senior Staff Data Engineer Jobs at Affirm
Align your portfolio with fintech data infrastructure
Affirm's data engineering work centers on real-time transaction pipelines, risk scoring systems, and financial data reliability. Highlight experience with large-scale streaming architectures or payment processing data before applying, since generic cloud experience won't differentiate you at the senior staff level.
Verify your OPT timeline before interview loops
F-1 OPT gives you 12 months of work authorization, with a 24-month STEM extension available for qualifying degrees. Confirm your OPT end date before Affirm's hiring loop starts, since multi-stage interviews at this seniority level can take 6 to 10 weeks.
Request H-1B cap-gap coverage if needed
If your OPT expires before October 1 and Affirm files your H-1B petition by April, cap-gap protection keeps you authorized to work. Confirm with Affirm's immigration team that the petition was filed before your EAD expiration to avoid any work authorization gap.
Understand how Affirm structures senior staff leveling
Senior staff roles at Affirm sit above staff engineer and carry expectations around cross-functional technical leadership and system design influence. Frame your experience around org-wide data platform decisions, not just team-level execution, to clear the leveling bar before compensation and visa discussions begin.
Track Affirm's LCA filings on the DOL disclosure database
The DOL's OFLC public disclosure data shows Affirm's certified Labor Condition Applications by job title and work location. Searching this database before your offer stage tells you which office locations Affirm has actively filed for data engineering roles, which matters if you're evaluating relocation.
Use Migrate Mate to surface current openings
Senior staff roles at Affirm aren't always posted broadly across general job boards. Use Migrate Mate to find actively sponsored Senior Staff Data Engineer positions at Affirm filtered by visa type, so you're applying to roles where sponsorship is already confirmed.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does Affirm sponsor H-1B visas for Senior Staff Data Engineers?
Yes, Affirm sponsors H-1B visas for Senior Staff Data Engineers. At this seniority level, Affirm has a documented pattern of supporting both initial H-1B cap filings and transfers for candidates already holding H-1B status. The company works with immigration counsel to handle the Labor Condition Application through DOL and the I-129 petition through USCIS. If you're mid-loop, ask your recruiter to confirm sponsorship eligibility for your specific role location.
How do I apply for Senior Staff Data Engineer jobs at Affirm?
Apply directly through Affirm's careers site or find sponsored openings through Migrate Mate, which filters roles by visa sponsorship type. At the senior staff level, Affirm's process typically includes a recruiter screen, a technical system design interview, a coding assessment, and a cross-functional leadership panel. Prepare to discuss how you've shaped data platform strategy across multiple teams, not just individual engineering contributions.
Which visa types does Affirm commonly use for Senior Staff Data Engineers?
Affirm sponsors H-1B visas for most international hires and supports F-1 OPT and CPT for candidates completing STEM graduate programs. TN visas are available for Canadian and Mexican nationals in qualifying engineering roles. For longer-term pathways, Affirm has supported EB-2 and EB-3 Green Card sponsorship for senior engineering staff, which typically involves PERM labor certification through DOL before USCIS petition filing.
What qualifications does Affirm expect for Senior Staff Data Engineer roles?
Affirm expects senior staff candidates to have substantial experience designing and operating distributed data systems at scale, typically including real-time streaming pipelines, data warehouse architecture, and cross-team platform ownership. A bachelor's or master's degree in computer science, data engineering, or a related field is standard. Beyond technical depth, the senior staff level requires demonstrated influence on engineering direction across multiple teams, not just individual project delivery.
How do I time my application if my visa status is expiring soon?
If you're on F-1 OPT, Affirm needs enough lead time to file an H-1B petition before your EAD expires or before the April cap filing deadline, whichever is sooner. H-1B cap petitions are filed in April for an October 1 start, so applications targeting that cycle should be active by January at the latest. If you already hold H-1B status, Affirm can file an H-1B transfer concurrent with your start date, avoiding any gap in authorization.