Engineering Manager, Resilience & Chaos Engineering

Affirm; San Diego (CA); On-site; USD 230,000 - 290,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health care coverage

Flexible Spending Wallets

Time off

ESPP

Job summary

Affirm is seeking an Engineering Manager to lead the Resilience Engineering team, focusing on production load testing and chaos engineering to ensure reliability of production systems. You will guide platforms and tooling, partner with infrastructure and security leaders, and establish best practices for safe experimentation in production.

You will drive end-to-end observability, monitoring, and incident response for proactive resilience validation, while mentoring engineers and embedding

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 chaos engineering vendors such as Gremlin or Harness.
• Strong understanding of failure modes in distributed systems incl. latency, partial failure, 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).
• Excellent problem-solving and ability to balance long-term resilience with immediate business needs.
• Strong communication and leadership skills with cross-team influence.
• This position requires either equivalent practical experience or a Bachelor's degree in a related field.

Responsibilities

• Define and drive the vision for resilience engineering with production load testing and chaos engineering as core practices.
• Lead and mentor engineers building platforms and tooling for safe production experimentation.
• Partner with infrastructure, product, and security leadership to embed resilience validation into the SDLC.
• Establish best practices for safely testing limits and failure scenarios in production.
• Own the design of platforms enabling safe production load testing and fault injection.
• Ensure safeguards: isolation, approvals, and automated rollback against real users.
• Build end-to-end observability, traceability, and auditability for resilience experiments.
• Drive reliability improvements via load testing and chaos experiments.
• Establish monitoring, alerting, and incident response for proactive resilience validation.
• Collaborate with engineering teams to execute tests safely and evangelize resilience culture.

Skills

Leadership

Production load testing

Chaos engineering

Distributed systems

AWS

Kubernetes

Observability

Python

Java

Communication

Education

Bachelor's degree or equivalent

Tools

Gremlin

Harness

Job description

Affirm is seeking an Engineering Manager to lead the Resilience Engineering team, focusing on production load testing and chaos engineering to ensure reliability of production systems. You will guide platforms and tooling, partner with infrastructure and security leaders, and establish best practices for safe experimentation in production.

You will drive end-to-end observability, monitoring, and incident response for proactive resilience validation, while mentoring engineers and embedding