Staff Software Engineer, Backend

Summary

Join Affirm's Developer Productivity team and lead the technical strategy, impacting the work of over 900 engineers. Collaborate with product, design, and analytics teams to ensure technical sustainability. Act as a force multiplier, defining and advocating technical solutions and operational processes. Take ownership of team operations and availability, implementing monitoring, triage, and on-call support. Foster a culture of quality and ownership through code reviews, design standards, and knowledge sharing. Develop team talent through feedback and guidance. This role requires 8+ years of experience in backend or infrastructure systems, expertise in distributed systems and AWS, and strong communication skills.

Requirements

• You have 8+ years of experience designing, developing and launching backend or infrastructure systems at scale using languages like Python or Kotlin
• Your growth and impact trajectory demonstrates that you have mastered proactively gathering and iterating on feedback from your engineering and cross-functional peers
• You have an extensive track record of supporting highly available distributed systems using technologies like AWS (GCP, Azure), distributed Databases, containerization, and Kubernetes. You have active experience building scalable infrastructure components including pipelines (Jenkins, Buildkite, GitHub Actions), configuration management, and automation
• You 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
• You thrive in ambiguity, and are comfortable moving from language idioms all the way to the architecture of large systems to deeply understand how they work
• You have strong verbal and written communication skills that support effective collaboration with our global and remote engineering team
• You keep informed and up-to-date on the tools, technologies, and best practices of one or more language ecosystems
• You have experience creating and maintaining automated workflows for building, testing, and deploying code, including identifying and resolving issues, and optimizing performance
• 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, policies, 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 conducting high quality code review and design standards for your team, and advocating for them beyond your team through your writing and tech talks, and increasing collaboration through practices like pair programming and knowledge sharing
• Help develop talent on your team by providing feedback and guidance, and leading by example

Benefits

• 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