Staff Software Engineer

Summary

Join Affirm's Infrastructure Platform Engineering team as a Staff Software Engineer and contribute to the reliability and efficiency of our distributed systems. You will set technical strategy, collaborate across teams, and act as a force-multiplier for your team's success. This role involves proactive failure mitigation, operational tooling, and on-call responsibilities. You'll foster a culture of quality and ownership, developing talent and advocating for technical solutions. Affirm is a rapidly scaling company, and this position is crucial for maintaining platform resilience across multiple regions. The role offers a competitive compensation and benefits package, including comprehensive health coverage and flexible work arrangements.

Requirements

• Have a total of 8+ years of experience as a software engineer
• Be proficient in designing, developing and launching backend systems at scale technologies like Python, Kotlin, AWS, MySQL, and Kubernetes
• Be proficient in developing web apps using declarative UI frameworks like React or Vue
• Ensure high availability (HA) and resilience of critical services through runbooks, incident response strategies, and post-mortem analysis
• Partner with Observability and Reliability teams to proactively detect and mitigate potential outages
• Have experience defining a technical plan for the delivery of a significant feature or system component with an elegant, simple and extensible design. You write high quality code that is easily understood and used by others
• Automate operational tasks, deployments, failover processes, and scaling strategies to reduce manual intervention
• Be proficient 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
• Partner closely with Storage & Replication, Cloud, CI/CD, and Security teams to ensure Affirm’s infrastructure meets high operational standards
• Your experience demonstrates that you take ownership of your growth, proactively seeking feedback from your team, your manager, and your stakeholders
• 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

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

Benefits

• 100% subsidized medical coverage, dental and vision for you and your dependents
• Equity rewards offered by Affirm Holdings, Inc. (parent company)
• Remote work
• Monthly stipends for health, wellness and tech spending
• 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