Senior Backend Engineer, AI Platform — Scale & Govern AI

Affirm, Inc.; Atlanta (GA); Remote; USD 190,000 - 240,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health coverage

Tech stipends

Flexible time off

ESPP

Job summary

Affim’s AI Platform team builds scalable gateway, runtime, and evaluation services for AI workloads used by affirm users and engineers. You will design, implement, and own backend systems, architecting secure, scalable solutions and codifying best practices across the team.

With 4+ years of backend experience, you will influence architecture, collaborate with security and infra, and mentor engineers while delivering production-grade features for a remote-first organization.

Qualifications

• 4+ years designing, developing and launching backend systems at scale in Python or Kotlin.
• Distributed systems with AWS, MySQL, Kubernetes.
• Hands-on with LLMs, agents, or AI frameworks in production: inference APIs, gateways, tool calls, evals.
• Understand AI usage and supporting infra across disciplines.
• Define technical plans for major feature delivery with clean, extensible design.
• Write high-quality, understandable code and enable team reuse.
• Own personal growth, seek feedback from team and stakeholders.
• Strong verbal and written communication for global collaboration.
• Bachelor’s degree or equivalent practical experience.

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, failover controls.
• Partner with security, infra, and product teams to set guardrails for agentic workloads and on-behalf-of identity model for tool access.
• Create and monitor metrics and own operational health: monitoring, alerting, runbooks, on-call.
• Set and improve code review and design standards and advocate them beyond the team.
• Use AI tools and agentic workflows daily and push for AI-native deliverables.
• Educate, mentor, and grow engineers, driving best practices in design, coding, and testing.

Skills

Backend design

Distributed systems

Python/Kotlin

Code ownership

Communication

On-call

Leadership

Growth mindset

Education

Bachelor\'s degree in related field

Tools

AWS

MySQL

Kubernetes

LLMs/AI tools

LiteLLM

Job description

Affim’s AI Platform team builds scalable gateway, runtime, and evaluation services for AI workloads used by affirm users and engineers. You will design, implement, and own backend systems, architecting secure, scalable solutions and codifying best practices across the team.

With 4+ years of backend experience, you will influence architecture, collaborate with security and infra, and mentor engineers while delivering production-grade features for a remote-first organization.