Staff Software Engineer, Backend Reliability Engineer

Summary

Join Affirm's Site Reliability Engineering team, a crucial group supporting engineering partners in operating applications with excellence. You will set technical strategy, collaborate across teams, act as a force-multiplier for your team, take ownership of operations and availability, and foster a culture of quality. This role requires extensive experience in backend systems, distributed systems, and Site Reliability Engineering. Affirm offers competitive benefits including 100% subsidized medical coverage, flexible spending stipends, competitive time off, and an ESPP. The position is remote-first, allowing flexibility to work from almost anywhere in the US.

Requirements

• Have 7+ years of experience designing, developing and launching backend systems at scale using languages like Python or Kotlin
• Have an extensive track record of developing highly available distributed systems using technologies like AWS, MySQL, Spark and Kubernetes
• Have 7+ years experience in a Site Reliability or Production Engineering team
• Demonstrate curiosity with empathy, and strong opinions loosely held
• 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
• Providing data and visibility to teams and leadership on application performance
• Guiding the development of SLOs
• Driving the Incident Management and Analysis process
• Steering the implementation of Change Management and Deployment practices
• Engaging in service and architectural conversations
• Recommending observability and alerting configurations

Benefits

• 100% subsidized medical coverage, dental and vision for you and your dependents
• 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
• Remote work