Senior Backend Engineer — Kubernetes & Cloud Infra

Affirm, Inc.; Oregon; Hybrid; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

Affirm, Inc. is seeking a Senior Kubernetes Engineer to help shape workload safety standards for our EKS fleet.

You will own end-to-end execution from research to policy guardrails, mentoring engineers and driving fleet-wide adoption for reliable, scalable infrastructure. In this role, you will isolate workloads by criticality, resolve node lifecycle issues, and design scaling patterns for bursty workloads.

Qualifications

• 5+ years running Kubernetes in production at scale.
• Experience with OPA Gatekeeper or Kyverno.
• Proficiency in Go or Python.
• Strong debugging and incident response experience.

Responsibilities

• Define and evolve workload safety standards for affirm's eks fleet, such as cpu and memory settings, workload isolation and placement.
• Own each standard end to end: prototyping, onboarding, self-service guidance, and policy guardrails.
• Lead cross‑team initiatives from design through rollout, mentor engineers, uphold design/code review standards.
• Isolate workloads by criticality and resource profile to protect checkout and other critical paths.
• Fix stuck workloads and node lifecycle problems like termination signals and bin packing delays.
• Determine safe operating limits of each cluster and develop scaling patterns for bursts.
• Analyze workload resource profiles to guide EC2 instance strategy and automate analysis.
• Measure impact on availability, latency, risk, and cost to guide roadmap.
• Participate in on-call for Kubernetes runtime issues and derive roadmap items.
• Collaborate with teams running services, batch jobs, and ML workloads on EKS.
• Stay current with Kubernetes best practices and adapt to affirm's needs.

Skills

Kubernetes

Go/Python

Policy as code

Production debugging

Leadership

Monitoring

Communication

Tools

OPA Gatekeeper

Kyverno

Karpenter

Admission Webhooks

Job description

Affirm, Inc. is seeking a Senior Kubernetes Engineer to help shape workload safety standards for our EKS fleet.

You will own end-to-end execution from research to policy guardrails, mentoring engineers and driving fleet-wide adoption for reliable, scalable infrastructure. In this role, you will isolate workloads by criticality, resolve node lifecycle issues, and design scaling patterns for bursty workloads.