Engineering Manager, Resilience & Chaos

Affirm, Inc.; San Diego (CA); Remote; USD 230,000 - 290,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

100% health coverage

Tech stipend

Flexible time off

Employee stock purchase plan

Job summary

Affim is seeking a seasoned Engineering Manager to lead our Resilience Engineering team, focused on safe production validation through load testing and chaos engineering. You will shape the strategy, mentor engineers, and partner with infrastructure, product, and security leaders to embed resilience into the software lifecycle.

You will own platforms for controlled production tests, implement safeguards, observability, and incident response practices, and drive reliability improvements across

Qualifications

• Proven experience leading engineering teams in reliability, infrastructure, or distributed systems.
• Hands-on experience with production load testing, chaos engineering, or large-scale system validation.
• Experience leveraging a chaos-engineering vendor such as Gremlin, Harness, or something similar.
• Strong understanding of failure modes in distributed systems, including latency, partial failure, and cascading outages.
• Experience building or operating systems with strong safety guarantees (isolation, rate limiting, guardrails, auditability).
• Familiarity with cloud-native environments (AWS, Kubernetes) and observability tooling.
• Strong programming background (e.g., Python, Kotlin, Java, or similar).
• Excellent problem-solving skills and the ability to balance long-term resilience investments with immediate business needs.
• Strong communication and leadership skills, with a track record of influencing engineering practices across teams.
• This position requires either equivalent practical experience or a Bachelor’s degree in a related field.

Responsibilities

• Define and drive the resilience engineering vision and practices.
• Lead and mentor engineers building platforms and tooling for safe production experimentation.
• Partner with leadership to embed resilience validation into the software development lifecycle.
• Establish best practices for safely testing production limits and failures.
• Own design and evolution of platforms for safe production load testing and fault injection.
• Ensure safeguards: isolation boundaries, approval workflows, and automatic rollback.
• Provide end-to-end observability, traceability, and auditability for resilience experiments.
• Drive reliability improvements via load tests and chaos experiments.

Skills

Leadership

Load testing

Chaos engineering

Distributed systems

Observability

Reliability engineering

Communication

Problem solving

Python

Java

Kotlin

Education

Bachelor's degree or equivalent

Tools

AWS

Kubernetes

Gremlin

Harness

Prometheus

OpenTelemetry

Job description

Affim is seeking a seasoned Engineering Manager to lead our Resilience Engineering team, focused on safe production validation through load testing and chaos engineering. You will shape the strategy, mentor engineers, and partner with infrastructure, product, and security leaders to embed resilience into the software lifecycle.

You will own platforms for controlled production tests, implement safeguards, observability, and incident response practices, and drive reliability improvements across