Staff Software Engineer

Summary

Join Affirm's Traffic Engineering team as a leader responsible for setting the technical strategy and guiding your team in critical, business-impacting projects. Collaborate with various teams throughout the product development lifecycle, ensuring technical sustainability and risk management. Act as a force multiplier by defining and advocating for technical solutions and operational processes. Take ownership of team operations and availability, implementing necessary monitoring, alerting, and on-call support. Foster a culture of quality and ownership by setting code review and design standards. Develop team talent through feedback, guidance, and leading by example. This role requires extensive experience in backend system design and development, familiarity with cloud technologies, and strong communication skills.

Requirements

• Have 8+ years of experience designing, developing and launching backend systems at scale using languages like Python or Kotlin
• Have experience developing fault-tolerant, multi-region online backend systems and an extensive track record of developing highly available distributed systems using technologies like AWS, MySQL, Spark and Kubernetes
• Have experience with Amazon Web Services (AWS) and/or other cloud providers like Google Cloud or Microsoft Azure
• Have familiarity with Service-Oriented Architectures (SOA)
• Have experience delivering major features, system components or deprecating existing functionality in a system through the definition of a technical and execution plan. You write high quality code that is easily understood and used by others
• Thrive in ambiguity, and are comfortable moving from low level language idioms all the way to the architecture of large systems to understand how they work
• Your growth and impact trajectory demonstrates that you have mastered gathering and iterating on feedback from your engineering and cross-functional peers
• Have strong verbal and written communication skills that support effective collaboration with our global engineering team
• This position requires either equivalent practical experience or a Bachelor’s degree in a related field

Responsibilities

• Set technical strategy for your team on a year-long time scale, and help your team tie it together with critical, business-impacting projects
• Collaborate across teams in the product development lifecycle by collaborating with product management, design & analytics to ensure technical sustainability, risks and trade-offs are well understood and managed
• Act as a force-multiplier for your team through your definition and advocacy of technical solutions and operational processes
• Take ownership of your team’s operations and availability by ensuring you have the right monitoring, triage rotations, playbooks, polcities, testing and alerting in place to support “keep the lights on” & on-call efforts
• Foster a culture of quality and ownership on your team by setting code review and design standards for your team, and advocating for them beyond your team through your writing and tech talks
• Help develop talent on your team by providing feedback and guidance, and leading by example

Preferred Qualifications

We use technologies such as Kubernetes, Docker, gRPC, Envoy, Istio, Celery/RabbitMQ, and NGINX, but we are always looking for new technologies to adopt

Benefits

• 100% subsidized medical coverage, dental and vision for you and your dependents
• Monthly stipends for health, wellness and tech spending
• 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
• Flexible Spending Wallets - generous stipends for spending on Technology, Food, various Lifestyle needs, and family forming expenses
• Remote work