Senior Backend Engineer, Reliability Platform

Affirm; Seattle (WA); On-site; USD 173,000 - 255,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health insurance

Flexible Spending Wallets

Time off

ESPP

Job summary

Affirm is seeking a Software Engineer to design and build a reliability platform for production systems. You will blend traditional distributed systems with AI-assisted development to give teams a single place to understand, debug, and improve health of services.

This is a highly creative, hands-on role emphasizing rapid iteration, quality, and maintainability, with ownership of quarterly goals and cross-functional collaboration across product, design, and analytics.

Qualifications

• 4+ years of software engineer experience.
• Experience designing, developing and launching backend systems at scale (Python, Kotlin, AWS, MySQL, Kubernetes).
• Experience shipping web apps with React or Vue.
• Practical use of LLMs or AI frameworks to enhance automation and guidance.
• Ability to define a technical plan for delivering significant features with simple, extensible design.
• Proven track record of safe large-codebase changes and tooling for teams.
• Demonstrated ownership of growth and proactive feedback seeking.
• Strong verbal and written communication for collaboration with global teams.
• Bachelor's degree or equivalent practical experience.

Responsibilities

• Own and deliver quarterly goals for your team, guiding engineers through ambiguity.
• Collaborate with product, design, and analytics to weigh constraints and trade-offs.
• Proactively identify and solve project, process, technology, or business issues.
• Maintain operations and availability of team artifacts; monitor metrics and support on-call efforts.
• Set or improve code review and design standards and advocate beyond your team.
• Develop talent by giving feedback and leading by example.

Skills

Backend systems design

Python

Kotlin

AWS

MySQL

Kubernetes

React or Vue

AI frameworks

Technical planning

Code quality & ownership

Education

Bachelor's degree or equivalent practical experience

Job description

Affirm is seeking a Software Engineer to design and build a reliability platform for production systems. You will blend traditional distributed systems with AI-assisted development to give teams a single place to understand, debug, and improve health of services.

This is a highly creative, hands-on role emphasizing rapid iteration, quality, and maintainability, with ownership of quarterly goals and cross-functional collaboration across product, design, and analytics.