Senior Backend Engineer - AI Platform (Remote-First)

Affirm, Inc.; Dallas (TX); Remote; USD 173,000 - 233,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health and wellness stipends

Equity participation (ESPP)

Flexible time off and holidays

100% subsidized health coverage

Job summary

Affirm, Inc. is seeking a backend engineer for its AI Platform team to design, build, and operate scalable infrastructure supporting safe, governable AI workloads. You will own projects from design through production, ensuring reliability across millions of transactions.

You will work with Python or Kotlin, AWS, and Kubernetes, contributing to gateways and runtimes while driving best practices and mentoring teammates in a remote-first environment.

Qualifications

• 4+ years designing, developing and launching backend systems at scale
• Track record of highly available distributed systems using AWS, MySQL and Kubernetes
• Experience building with LLMs, agents, or AI frameworks in production
• Ability to define a technical plan for significant feature delivery with a simple design
• Strong code quality and maintainability across a large code base

Responsibilities

• Plan, execute, and own technical decisions and projects within the AI Platform team, from design through launch and on-call.
• Design and build gateway, runtime, and evaluation services for AI workloads at scale.
• Implement identity, quota, routing, caching, and failover controls for model/tool adoption.
• Collaborate with security, infrastructure, and product engineering to set guardrails for agent workloads and identity models.
• Create and monitor metrics; own operational health, runbooks, and on-call responsibilities.
• Set and enforce code review and design standards; contribute to discussions beyond the team.
• Utilize AI tools and agentic workflows to improve code review, design, and operations.
• Mentor engineers; promote best practices in design, coding, and testing.

Skills

Backend design

Python or Kotlin

Distributed systems

Communication

Ownership

Education

Bachelor’s degree or equivalent practical experience

Tools

AWS

MySQL

Kubernetes

LLMs/AI frameworks

Job description

Affirm, Inc. is seeking a backend engineer for its AI Platform team to design, build, and operate scalable infrastructure supporting safe, governable AI workloads. You will own projects from design through production, ensuring reliability across millions of transactions.

You will work with Python or Kotlin, AWS, and Kubernetes, contributing to gateways and runtimes while driving best practices and mentoring teammates in a remote-first environment.