Staff Backend Engineer — Remote, Scale & Reliability

Affirm; Regina; On-site; CAD 181,000 - 241,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health coverage for you and dependents

Equity rewards

Monthly tech stipends

Remote-first

Job summary

Affirm is reinventing credit to offer flexible buy now, pay later options with no hidden fees or compounded interest. The Capacity Modeling team builds capacity plans from demand forecasts, mapping traffic inputs to resource outputs and translating forecasts into capacity settings across regions.

You will lead technical strategy, collaborate across product and analytics, and own operational readiness. The role emphasizes ownership, quality, and driving scalable systems in a remote-first

Qualifications

• 8+ years designing, developing and launching backend systems at scale.
• Experience with highly available distributed systems using AWS, MySQL, Spark and Kubernetes.
• Experience supporting scale up/down for large sales events like Prime Day, Black Friday/C Cyber Monday.
• Tuning autoscaling, CPU/Memory, and multi-threading for compute workloads.
• Experience delivering major features or deprecating functionality via technical plans.
• Comfortable moving from low level language idioms to architecture of large systems.
• Growth and impact through feedback from engineers and cross-functional peers.
• Strong verbal and written communication for global collaboration.

Responsibilities

• Set technical strategy for the team on a year-long horizon.
• Collaborate with product, design and analytics to manage risks and trade-offs.
• Advocate technical solutions and operational processes.
• Own team operations and on-call readiness with monitoring and playbooks.
• Set code review and design standards and promote them beyond the team.
• Develop talent by giving feedback and mentoring.

Skills

Backend design

Distributed systems

Python

Kotlin

Tools

AWS

MySQL

Spark

Kubernetes

Job description

Affirm is reinventing credit to offer flexible buy now, pay later options with no hidden fees or compounded interest. The Capacity Modeling team builds capacity plans from demand forecasts, mapping traffic inputs to resource outputs and translating forecasts into capacity settings across regions.

You will lead technical strategy, collaborate across product and analytics, and own operational readiness. The role emphasizes ownership, quality, and driving scalable systems in a remote-first