Remote-First Senior Staff Kubernetes Platform Engineer

Affirm, Inc.; San Jose (CA); Remote; USD 265,000 - 325,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health coverage for employee anddepend

Monthly tech stipends

Job summary

Affirm, Inc. is seeking a senior Compute Platform Engineer to lead the Kubernetes fleet on AWS, drive provisioning with IaC, and mentor engineers across the Compute Platform teams. The role emphasizes building trusted, self-service workflows and ensuring high availability of shared components.

You will own workload safety standards, observability, and cost optimization while collaborating with product and SRE teams to maintain a scalable, secure infrastructure across environments.

Qualifications

• 10+ years in software or infrastructure engineering with proven delivery of complex platform solutions.
• 6+ years hands-on operating production Kubernetes at scale, ideally EKS on AWS.
• Strong cloud-native architecture experience on AWS (EC2, VPC, IAM, EKS).
• Experience with Infrastructure-as-Code (Terraform, Spacelift a plus) and GitOps-style deployment pipelines.
• Expert-level proficiency in Go or Python and a proven track record building production-grade Kubernetes controllers, operators, and platform tooling that other engineering teams depend on.
• Track record designing and enforcing standards across many teams without becoming a bottleneck.
• Exceptional problem-solving and systems-thinking skills.
• Demonstrated leadership and cross-functional influence.
• Excellent communication skills.

Responsibilities

• Architect and evolve Affi platform, driving strategy across cluster lifecycle, node management, and shared cluster components.
• Lead the technical direction for cluster provisioning, upgrades, and teardown through standardized IaC (Terraform, Spacelift) and self-service workflows.
• Own the reliability of core shared components across the fleet (Karpenter, CoreDNS, VPC CNI, Kube Proxy, Metrics Server, etc) and the CI/CD pipeline that ships them consistently.
• Define and enforce EKS workload safety standards covering resource configuration, workload isolation and blast radius, disruption tolerance (PDBs), Karpenter consolidation strategies, etc.
• Build the enforcement and automation path that moves each standard from research and white-glove onboarding through broad adoption to policy-enforced defaults for new workloads.
• Establish the observability, baseline audits, and reporting needed to identify hot spots and measure risk mitigation over time.
• Partner with cluster-user teams (checkout, batch, ML, analytics, DevProd, etc) to understand workload needs and shape the platform accordingly.
• Drive cost and capacity strategy across node scaling, bin packing, and EC2 instance selection.
• Mentor engineers across the Compute Platform teams and set the bar for operational excellence.
• Participate in the on-call rotation, triage and catalogue runtime K8s issues, and collaborate with SRE on production incidents.

Skills

Kubernetes expertise

Go or Python

Terraform / IaC

GitOps practices

Leadership

Communication

Cross-functional collaboration

Tools

AWS (EC2, VPC, IAM, EKS)

Terraform

Spacelift

ArgoCD

Karpenter

CoreDNS

Job description

Affirm, Inc. is seeking a senior Compute Platform Engineer to lead the Kubernetes fleet on AWS, drive provisioning with IaC, and mentor engineers across the Compute Platform teams. The role emphasizes building trusted, self-service workflows and ensuring high availability of shared components.

You will own workload safety standards, observability, and cost optimization while collaborating with product and SRE teams to maintain a scalable, secure infrastructure across environments.