Senior Backend Engineer — AI-Driven Reliability Platform

Affirm; Baltimore (MD); On-site; USD 173,000 - 255,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health care coverage

Flexible Spending Wallets

Time off

Employee stock purchase plan

Job summary

Affirm is seeking a Software Engineer to design and build a next-generation reliability platform for affirm’s production systems. You’ll blend traditional distributed systems engineering with AI-assisted development to give teams a single place to understand, debug, and improve the health of their services.

This is a highly creative, hands-on role for someone who loves “vibe coding” — rapidly iterating, shipping, and refining with strong intuition— while still holding a very high bar for

Qualifications

• 4+ years of software engineering experience.
• Design, develop, and launch backend systems at scale using Python, Kotlin, AWS, MySQL, and Kubernetes.
• Experience shipping web apps with React or Vue.
• Practical use of LLMs/AI frameworks to enhance automation with guardrails and citations.
• Ability to define a technical plan for major features with simple, extensible design.
• Strong ownership, proactive feedback-seeking, and high-quality code.
• Excellent written and verbal communication for global teams.
• Equivalent practical experience or a Bachelor's degree in a related field.

Responsibilities

• Own and deliver quarterly goals for your team, guiding engineers through ambiguity to solve open-ended problems.
• Collaborate with product, design, and analytics to discuss constraints and trade-offs.
• Identify and advocate for project, process, technology or business improvements and lead solutions.
• Support operations and availability by creating metrics, escalating when needed, and supporting “keep the lights on” on-call efforts.
• Set or improve code review and design standards and evangelize them beyond the team.
• Mentor teammates with feedback and example-driven leadership.

Skills

Python

Kotlin

AWS

MySQL

Kubernetes

React

Vue

LLMs/AI frameworks

Technical planning

Code ownership

Education

Bachelor's degree or equivalent

Job description

Affirm is seeking a Software Engineer to design and build a next-generation reliability platform for affirm’s production systems. You’ll blend traditional distributed systems engineering with AI-assisted development to give teams a single place to understand, debug, and improve the health of their services.

This is a highly creative, hands-on role for someone who loves “vibe coding” — rapidly iterating, shipping, and refining with strong intuition— while still holding a very high bar for