Manager, Software Engineering (Resilience Engineering)

Affirm; Raleigh (NC); On-site; USD 200,000 - 250,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

100% subsidized medical coverage

Flexible Spending Wallets

Employee stock purchase plan

Job summary

Affirm is seeking an Engineering Manager to lead the Resilience Engineering team based in Raleigh, North Carolina. This role focuses on ensuring the reliability and safety of production systems using techniques like production load testing and chaos engineering. Candidates should have a strong background in engineering leadership, production load testing, and cloud-native environments. Affirm offers a remote-first work model with competitive compensation and benefits, ensuring flexibility for employees across the United States.

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 with leveraging chaos engineering vendors.

Responsibilities

• Define and drive the vision for resilience engineering at Affirm.
• Lead and mentor a team of engineers building platforms for safe production experimentation.
• Establish best practices for safely testing system limits in production.

Skills

Production load testing

Chaos engineering

System validation

Problem-solving

Cloud-native environments (AWS, Kubernetes)

Education

Bachelor's degree in a related field or equivalent practical experience

Tools

Gremlin

Harness

Job description

Overview

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.

We are seeking a seasoned Engineering Manager to lead our Resilience Engineering team. This role is critical in ensuring the safety and reliability of our production systems through proactive validation techniques, including production load testing and chaos engineering.

You will lead the development of systems and practices that allow engineers to safely test system behavior under stress and failure conditions in production, ensuring issues are discovered and mitigated before they impact real users.

What you’ll do

Leadership & Strategy

• Define and drive the vision for resilience engineering at Affirm, with a focus on production load testing and chaos engineering as first-class engineering practices.
• Lead and mentor a team of engineers building platforms and tooling for safe production experimentation.
• Partner with infrastructure, product, and security leadership to embed resilience validation into the software development lifecycle.
• Establish best practices for safely testing system limits and failure scenarios in production.

Systems & Operations

• Own the design and evolution of platforms that enable safe, controlled production load testing and fault injection.
• Ensure strong safeguards are in place, including isolation boundaries, approval workflows, and automated rollback mechanisms to protect real users.
• Build systems that provide end-to-end observability, traceability, and auditability for all resilience experiments.
• Drive reliability improvements by systematically identifying weaknesses through load testing and chaos experiments.
• Establish monitoring, alerting, and incident response practices tailored to proactive resilience validation.

Collaboration & Enablement

• Work closely with engineering teams to design and execute production load tests and chaos experiments safely.
• Partner with infrastructure teams to build guardrails around tests and experimentations.
• Enable teams to adopt resilience practices by providing reusable tooling, frameworks, and standardized workflows.
• Identify systemic weaknesses and lead cross-functional efforts to improve reliability and fault tolerance.
• Evangelize a culture of “test failure before failure tests you” across the organization.

What we look for

• 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 with 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.

Base Pay Grade - P

Equity Grade - 13

Employees new to Affirm typically come in at the start of the pay range. Affirm focuses on providing a simple and transparent pay structure which is based on a variety of factors, including location, experience and job-related skills.

Base pay is part of a total compensation package that may include equity rewards, monthly stipends for health, wellness and tech spending, and benefits (including 100% subsidized medical coverage, dental and vision for you and your dependents.)

USA base pay range (CA, WA, NY, NJ, CT) per year: $225,000 - $275,000

USA base pay range (all other U.S. states) per year: $200,000 - $250,000

Affirm is proud to be a remote-first company! The majority of our roles are remote and you can work almost anywhere within the country of employment. Affirmers in proximal roles have the flexibility to work remotely, but will occasionally be required to work out of their assigned Affirm office. A limited number of roles remain office-based due to the nature of their job responsibilities.

Benefits

We’re extremely proud to offer competitive benefits that are anchored to our core value of people come first. Some key highlights of our benefits package include:

• Health care coverage - Affirm covers all premiums for all levels of coverage for you and your dependents
• Flexible Spending Wallets - generous stipends for spending on Technology, Food, various Lifestyle needs, and family forming expenses
• Time off - competitive vacation and holiday schedules allowing you to take time off to rest and recharge
• ESPP - An employee stock purchase plan enabling you to buy shares of Affirm at a discount

We believe It’s On Us to provide an inclusive interview experience for all, including people with disabilities. We are happy to provide reasonable accommodations to candidates in need of individualized support during the hiring process.

[For U.S. positions that could be performed in Los Angeles or San Francisco] Pursuant to the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance and Los Angeles Fair Chance Initiative for Hiring Ordinance, Affirm will consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records.

By clicking "Submit Application," you acknowledge that you have read Affirm's Global Candidate Privacy Notice and hereby freely and unambiguously give informed consent to the collection, processing, use, and storage of your personal information as described therein.