Senior Backend Engineer, Kubernetes & EKS Platform

Affirm, Inc.; San Francisco (CA); Remote; USD 173,000 - 255,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity rewards

Medical, dental and vision coverage

Remote-first with flexible in-person

Job summary

Affirm, a leading remote-first financial tech company, seeks a Senior Kubernetes Engineer to define and enforce standards across its EKS fleet. You will own core workload safety guidelines, drive end-to-end implementation, mentor engineers, and partner with capacity and SRE teams to maintain high availability and performance.

You will analyze resource profiles, automate policy guardrails, and help scale the fleet to support worldwide growth. Strong Go or Python skills are required.

Qualifications

• 5+ years running Kubernetes in production at scale.
• Deep understanding of Kubernetes resource management and scheduling.
• Experience enforcing configuration standards through admission control and policy-as-code.

Responsibilities

• Define and evolve workload safety standards for affirm's EKS fleet.
• Own each standard end to end from research to enforcement.
• Lead cross-team initiatives from design through rollout and mentor engineers.
• Isolate workloads by criticality to protect checkout and other critical paths.
• Fix stuck workloads and node lifecycle problems.
• Determine safe operating limits and develop scaling patterns for bursts.
• Analyze workload resources to guide instance type strategy.
• Measure impact on availability, latency, risk and cost; adjust roadmap accordingly.
• Participate in on-call for Kubernetes runtime issues across the fleet.

Skills

Kubernetes prod ops

EKS expertise

Go or Python

Incident debugging

Cross-team leadership

Policy enforcement

Performance tuning

On-call experience

Education

Bachelor’s degree or equivalent

Tools

OPA Gatekeeper

Kyverno

Karpenter

Go

Job description

Affirm, a leading remote-first financial tech company, seeks a Senior Kubernetes Engineer to define and enforce standards across its EKS fleet. You will own core workload safety guidelines, drive end-to-end implementation, mentor engineers, and partner with capacity and SRE teams to maintain high availability and performance.

You will analyze resource profiles, automate policy guardrails, and help scale the fleet to support worldwide growth. Strong Go or Python skills are required.