Staff Software Engineer, Backend (Cost Engineering)

Affirm; Windsor; On-site; CAD 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

Affirm is seeking a Staff Cost Engineer to architect tooling and processes that scale cost governance across a fast-growing multi-cloud and multi-AI-vendor footprint. You’ll set technical direction, influence cost strategy with infra and platform leaders, and turn ambiguity into actionable cost visibility and accountability.

You will own tooling for spend visibility, tagging strategy, and proactive cost optimizations, collaborating with cross-functional teams to align business outcomes with

Qualifications

• Design tooling and automation for scalable cost governance.
• Lead cost strategy with infra and platform teams.
• Collaborate across cloud and AI vendor environments.

Responsibilities

• Develop and implement cloud cost governance tooling.
• Monitor and optimize spend across multi-cloud and AI tools.
• Drive tagging strategies and anomaly detection for cost visibility.

Skills

Cost governance

Cloud cost mgmt

AWS cost optimization

Data engineering collab

Tools

AWS

GCP

Azure

Job description

Affirm is reinventing credit to make it more honest and friendly, giving consumers the flexibility to buy now and pay later without any hidden fees or compounding interest.

Engineering owns cost visibility and optimization across affirm's cloud and AI infrastructure. We're the team that tells the business what it's spending, why it's changing, and what to do about it - from AWS resource waste and tagging strategy to the newer frontier of AI/LLM spend across the company's growing set of AI tools. We treat cost anomalies with the same rigor as production incidents: we've built a severity framework (mirroring affirm's SEV0-3 incident model but mapped to dollar impact) with defined detection sources, TTD/TTR metrics, and escalation paths, and we operate a clear RACI with partner orgs - we own visibility and alerting, and partner teams own remediation (at times we may dig in deep and own remediation too!), so accountability never gets diffuse.

As a Staff Cost Engineer, you'll operate at the intersection of finance, infrastructure, and data engineering - designing the tooling, automation, and processes that scale cost governance across a fast-growing multi-cloud and multi-AI-vendor footprint. You'll set technical direction for the team, influence cost strategy with infra and platform leaders across the org, and turn ambiguous \