Staff Backend Engineer - Cost Intelligence & FinOps

Affirm, Inc.; Canada; On-site; CAD 181,000 - 241,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health care coverage

Flexible Spending Wallets

Time off

Employee stock purchase plan (ESPP)

Job summary

Affirm, Inc. seeks a Staff Cost Engineer to lead cost governance across a multi-cloud and multi-AI-vendor footprint. You will drive tooling and automation to turn spend questions into durable, self-service systems, working at the intersection of finance, infra and data engineering.

You will set the technical direction, influence cost strategy with leaders, and own the team’s operations, monitoring, and reliability while delivering scalable cost-savings insights.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of experience designing, developing and launching backend systems at scale.
• Extensive track record of building highly available distributed systems using AWS, MySQL, Spark and Kubernetes.
• Experience with a FinOps or cost-visibility platform (e.g., FinOut, CloudHealth, Kubecost, or internal equivalent).
• Proven ability to build automation or tooling (Python, Terraform) to scale cost-review processes.
• Hands-on experience with cloud billing/cost data at scale and writing complex SQL to model spend.
• Demonstrated ability to define technical/execution plans and deliver high-quality code.

Responsibilities

• Set technical strategy for the team on a year-long time scale and align with business projects.
• Collaborate across product, design and analytics to ensure sustainability and risk are understood.
• Act as a force-multiplier by defining solutions and operational processes.
• Own team operations and on-call readiness, with monitoring, playbooks and alerting in place.
• Set and propagate code and design standards across the organization.
• Mentor and develop team members through feedback and leadership by example.

Skills

Backend systems design

Cost governance

Cross-functional collaboration

Strong communication

Ambiguity handling

Tools

AWS

MySQL

Spark

Kubernetes

Python

Terraform

SQL

Job description

Affirm, Inc. seeks a Staff Cost Engineer to lead cost governance across a multi-cloud and multi-AI-vendor footprint. You will drive tooling and automation to turn spend questions into durable, self-service systems, working at the intersection of finance, infra and data engineering.

You will set the technical direction, influence cost strategy with leaders, and own the team’s operations, monitoring, and reliability while delivering scalable cost-savings insights.