Senior Backend Engineer, AI Platform (Remote)

Affirm, Inc.; Washington (District of Columbia); 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 a Senior Backend Engineer for the AI Platform team. You will design, build, and operate scalable backend systems powering AI workloads, with a focus on secure, observable, and high-availability services.

You will collaborate with global engineers to deliver production-grade gateways and runtimes for AI models and tools. Ideal candidates have 4+ years designing backend systems, hands-on experience with AWS, MySQL, Kubernetes, and a track record of delivering significant

Qualifications

• 4+ years designing, developing and launching backend systems at scale.
• Experience with AWS, MySQL and Kubernetes in production environments.
• Hands-on with AI frameworks and LLMs in production: inference APIs, gateways, tool calls.
• Ability to define technical plans for delivering major features.
• Strong code in large codebases with tooling and practices.
• Excellent written and verbal communication for global teams.

Responsibilities

• Plan, execute, and own technical decisions and projects within the AI Platform team, from design through launch and on-call.
• Design and build the gateway, runtime, and evaluation services for AI workloads at scale.
• Make AI spend attributable and governable: identity, quota, routing, caching, and failover controls.
• Partner with security, infrastructure, and product engineering to set guardrails for agentic workloads.
• Create and monitor metrics; own the operational health of what you ship.
• Set and improve code review and design standards; advocate beyond your team.
• Use AI tools and agentic workflows to multiply your code, reviews, and operations.
• Educate, mentor, and grow engineers, driving best practices in design, coding, and testing.

Skills

Backend design

Distributed systems

LLMs/AI platforms

Technical planning

Code ownership

Communication skills

Education

Bachelor’s degree or equivalent

Tools

AWS

MySQL

Kubernetes

Job description

Affirm, Inc. is seeking a Senior Backend Engineer for the AI Platform team. You will design, build, and operate scalable backend systems powering AI workloads, with a focus on secure, observable, and high-availability services.

You will collaborate with global engineers to deliver production-grade gateways and runtimes for AI models and tools. Ideal candidates have 4+ years designing backend systems, hands-on experience with AWS, MySQL, Kubernetes, and a track record of delivering significant