Senior Backend Engineer, AI Platform (Remote)

Affirm, Inc.; Chicago (IL); Remote; USD 173,000 - 233,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health coverage for dependents

Monthly tech stipend

Flexible time off

Employee stock purchase plan

Job summary

Affirm is hiring for a senior backend engineer to join the AI Platform team. You will design and operate the gateway, runtime, and evaluation services that scale AI workloads for millions of users. You’ll work closely with security and infrastructure to enforce strong guardrails and ownership of platform health.

The role emphasizes ownership, production experience with LLMs or AI frameworks, and leadership in design and code quality. Remote-first with flexible on-site options.

Qualifications

• 4+ years designing, developing and launching backend systems at scale.
• Experience with Python or Kotlin, and distributed architectures.
• Proven ability to work with AWS, MySQL and Kubernetes in production.

Responsibilities

• Plan, execute, and own technical decisions and projects within the AI Platform team.
• Design and build gateway, runtime, and evaluation services for AI workloads.
• Establish guardrails for identity, quota, routing, caching, and failover.
• Collaborate with security, infra, and product teams on tool access controls.
• Create and monitor metrics; own on-call, runbooks, and incident response.
• Set design standards; evangelize best practices through talks and code reviews.
• Mentor engineers and push for AI-native improvements in products.

Skills

Python

Kotlin

Backend design

Distributed systems

Education

Bachelor's degree

Tools

AWS

MySQL

Kubernetes

Job description

Affirm is hiring for a senior backend engineer to join the AI Platform team. You will design and operate the gateway, runtime, and evaluation services that scale AI workloads for millions of users. You’ll work closely with security and infrastructure to enforce strong guardrails and ownership of platform health.

The role emphasizes ownership, production experience with LLMs or AI frameworks, and leadership in design and code quality. Remote-first with flexible on-site options.