Senior Backend Engineer — Remote-First, Scale & Ownership

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

Benefits offered by this job

100% covered medical for employee and

Job summary

Affirm, Inc. is seeking a backend engineer to own and deliver scalable systems in a remote-first environment.

You will design, develop, and deploy critical backend services using Python or Kotlin, and lead engineering efforts with a focus on reliability and performance across distributed systems. You will collaborate with product, design and analytics, drive technical plans, and mentor peers while maintaining high code quality and strong ownership.

Qualifications

• 4+ years designing, developing and launching backend systems at scale.
• Experience designing with Python or Kotlin.
• Proven experience building highly available distributed systems using AWS, MySQL and Kubernetes.
• Ability to define a technical plan for delivering significant features with simple, extensible design.
• Demonstrated ownership, proactive feedback-seeking and safe, scalable code changes.
• Strong verbal and written communication for global collaboration.
• Bachelor’s degree or equivalent practical experience.

Responsibilities

• Own and deliver quarterly goals for your team, guiding engineers through ambiguity to solutions.
• Collaborate with product management, design and analytics in ideation and trade-off decisions.
• Identify and lead resolution of project, process, technology or business issues.
• Support operations and availability of team artifacts by creating and monitoring metrics and on-call efforts.
• Raise quality and ownership by setting code review and design standards and evangelizing them.
• Develop talent on your team by mentoring and leading by example.

Skills

Backend design

Distributed systems

Python/Kotlin

Code quality

Technical leadership

Communication

Education

Bachelor’s degree or equivalent

Tools

AWS

MySQL

Kubernetes

Job description

Affirm, Inc. is seeking a backend engineer to own and deliver scalable systems in a remote-first environment.

You will design, develop, and deploy critical backend services using Python or Kotlin, and lead engineering efforts with a focus on reliability and performance across distributed systems. You will collaborate with product, design and analytics, drive technical plans, and mentor peers while maintaining high code quality and strong ownership.