Senior Backend Engineer - Remote, Scalable Orchestration

Affirm; Boston (MA); On-site; USD 173,000 - 255,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health coverage

Employee stock purchase plan (ESPP)

Flexible vacation

Remote-first

Job summary

Affirm is reinventing credit with a remote-first culture. We seek a Senior Backend Engineer to own quarterly goals, lead engineers, and deliver scalable backend systems using Python/Kotlin and cloud-native stack.

You’ll partner with product, design and analytics, drive architecture decisions, and maintain high availability tooling. This role emphasizes ownership, clean code, and collaboration across a global team.

Qualifications

• 4+ years designing, developing and launching backend systems at scale.
• Experience with AWS, MySQL and Kubernetes for distributed systems.
• Experience building/work with workflow orchestration tools (Airflow, Flyte, Prefect, Temporal, Luigi, etc.).
• Experience scaling Spark/Flink on Kubernetes for large datasets.
• Ability to define a technical plan and deliver high-quality, maintainable code.
• Proven ownership mindset and ability to drive initiatives.
• Strong verbal and written communication for global teams.
• Bachelor’s degree or equivalent practical experience.

Responsibilities

• Own and deliver quarterly goals for the team, guiding engineers through ambiguity.
• Collaborate with product management, design and analytics through ideation and decisions.
• Identify issues and lead in solving project, process or technology risks.
• Support operations and availability of team artifacts, monitor metrics, and handle on-call work.
• Establish and promote code review and design standards across teams.
• Develop talent by giving feedback and mentoring teammates.

Skills

Backend systems

Distributed systems

AWS

MySQL

Kubernetes

Workflow orchestration

Airflow

Spark

Flink

Code quality

Ownership

Communication

Education

Bachelor’s degree or equivalent

Tools

Airflow

Job description

Affirm is reinventing credit with a remote-first culture. We seek a Senior Backend Engineer to own quarterly goals, lead engineers, and deliver scalable backend systems using Python/Kotlin and cloud-native stack.

You’ll partner with product, design and analytics, drive architecture decisions, and maintain high availability tooling. This role emphasizes ownership, clean code, and collaboration across a global team.