Remote Staff Backend Engineer: Capacity Modeling & Scale

Affirm; Salt Lake City (UT); On-site; USD 204,000 - 290,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health care coverage

Flexible Spending Wallets

Time off

ESPÁP - Employee Stock Purchase Plan

Job summary

Affirm seeks an experienced backend leader to shape a year-long technical strategy for a capacity modeling team. You will align with product management, design, and analytics to ensure sustainable and scalable solutions, and act as a force-multiplier by defining operational processes and standards.

You will drive ownership of reliability, performance tuning, and talent development, guiding a team through complex architectures and high-visibility projects in a remote-first environment.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of experience designing, developing and launching backend systems at scale.
• Strong track record of developing highly available distributed systems.
• Experience with AWS, MySQL, Spark and Kubernetes.
• Experience supporting scale up/down for large sales events like Prime Day / Black Friday.
• Ability to tune autoscaling, CPU/Memory, and multi-threading for compute workloads.
• Experience delivering major features or systems via a clear execution plan.
• Comfort with moving from low-level code to large system architecture.

Responsibilities

• Set technical strategy for the team on a year-long horizon.
• Collaborate with product management, design & analytics across the product lifecycle.
• Advocate for technical solutions and operational processes.
• Own team operations and availability including monitoring, on-call, and runbooks.
• Set code review and design standards and evangelize them beyond the team.
• Mentor and develop team members through feedback and example.

Skills

Backend design

Distributed systems

Python

Kotlin

AWS

MySQL

Spark

Kubernetes

Education

Bachelor's degree in related field

Tools

AWS

Kubernetes

Spark

MySQL

Job description

Affirm seeks an experienced backend leader to shape a year-long technical strategy for a capacity modeling team. You will align with product management, design, and analytics to ensure sustainable and scalable solutions, and act as a force-multiplier by defining operational processes and standards.

You will drive ownership of reliability, performance tuning, and talent development, guiding a team through complex architectures and high-visibility projects in a remote-first environment.