Remote Staff Backend Engineer — Scalable Systems

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

Benefits offered by this job

Health coverage and benefits

Job summary

Affirm is seeking an experienced backend engineering leader to set technical strategy for a year-long roadmap and align it with business-impacting projects. You will partner across product, design and analytics to ensure sustainability, manage risks, and drive performance at scale.

You will own operations and availability, establish code and design standards, mentor teammates, and help deliver high-quality services in a payments-focused domain.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of experience designing, developing and launching backend systems at scale using languages like Python or Kotlin.
• Extensive track record of developing highly available distributed systems using AWS, MySQL, Spark and Kubernetes.
• Analytical and discerning in designing services with clear API boundaries, reliability, consistency, and failure handling — ideally in payments, commerce, ledger, or other financially-sensitive domain.
• Experience delivering major features, system components or deprecating existing functionality through a technical and execution plan.
• You write high quality code that is easily understood and used by others.
• You thrive in ambiguity, moving from low level language idioms to architecture of large systems.
• Growth trajectory showing you gather and iterate on feedback from engineering and cross-functional peers.
• Strong verbal and written communication skills for collaboration with a global engineering team.
• Equivalent practical experience or a Bachelor’s degree in a related field.

Responsibilities

• Set technical strategy for your team on a year-long time scale and align with business-impacting projects.
• Collaborate across product management, design & analytics to ensure technical sustainability, risks and trade-offs are understood.
• Act as a force-multiplier for your team through definition and advocacy of technical solutions and operational processes.
• Own your team’s operations and availability with monitoring, triage rotations, playbooks, policies, testing and alerting in place to support keep the lights on and on-call efforts.
• Foster a culture of quality and ownership by setting code review and design standards and promoting them beyond your team.
• Develop talent on your team by providing feedback and guidance, and leading by example.

Skills

Backend development

Distributed systems

Python

Kotlin

AWS

MySQL

Spark

Kubernetes

API design

Technical leadership

Education

Bachelor's degree or equivalent in related field

Tools

Docker

Terraform

Job description

Affirm is seeking an experienced backend engineering leader to set technical strategy for a year-long roadmap and align it with business-impacting projects. You will partner across product, design and analytics to ensure sustainability, manage risks, and drive performance at scale.

You will own operations and availability, establish code and design standards, mentor teammates, and help deliver high-quality services in a payments-focused domain.