Senior Backend Engineer, AI Platform (Remote)

Affirm, Inc.; Raleigh (NC); Remote; USD 173,000 - 255,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health coverage

Tech stipends

Flexible time off

ESPP

Job summary

Affirm, Inc. is seeking an experienced backend engineer for the AI Platform team. You will design and operate gateway, runtime, and evaluation services that scale AI workloads across millions of users, with strong emphasis on security, performance, and reliability.

You will collaborate with security, infra, and product teams to establish guardrails, governance, and observability, while mentoring engineers and advancing best practices in design and testing.

Qualifications

• 4+ years building backend systems at scale in Python or Kotlin.
• Experience with highly available distributed architectures using AWS, MySQL, and Kubernetes.
• Practical experience with LLMs, agents, or AI frameworks in production.
• Ability to define technical plans for significant features with clean, extensible design.
• Strong ownership mindset and proactive feedback culture.

Responsibilities

• Plan, execute, and own technical decisions from design to on-call.
• Design and build the gateway, runtime, and evaluation services for AI workloads.
• Implement identity, quota, routing, caching, and failover controls for model/tool access.
• Partner with security, infra, and product teams to set guardrails for agent workloads and on-behalf-of identity.
• Create and monitor metrics; own operational health, runbooks, and on-call readiness.
• Elevate coding standards and conduct design/code reviews beyond the team.
• Leverage AI tools and agent workflows to boost team productivity and delivery.
• Educate and mentor engineers; promote best practices in design, coding, and testing.

Skills

Python or Kotlin

Distributed systems

AWS

MySQL

Kubernetes

LLMs/AI frameworks

Strong communication

Education

Bachelor’s degree or equivalent practical experience

Tools

LiteLLM

Git

Job description

Affirm, Inc. is seeking an experienced backend engineer for the AI Platform team. You will design and operate gateway, runtime, and evaluation services that scale AI workloads across millions of users, with strong emphasis on security, performance, and reliability.

You will collaborate with security, infra, and product teams to establish guardrails, governance, and observability, while mentoring engineers and advancing best practices in design and testing.