Senior EKS Platform Architect (Remote-First)

Affirm, Inc.; Minneapolis (MN); Remote; USD 236,000 - 296,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health coverage

Monthly stipends for tech setup

Flexible time off

ESPP

Job summary

Affirm, Inc. is seeking a senior engineer to architect and evolve our EKS platform across cluster lifecycle, provisioning, and shared components. You will own reliability, enforce workload safety, and lead automation from research to policy-enforced defaults for new workloads.

You will mentor engineers, drive observability and cost strategies, and collaborate with cross-functional teams to scale our Kubernetes footprint in a remote-first environment.

Qualifications

• 10+ years in software or infrastructure engineering with proven delivery of complex platform solutions.
• 6+ years hands-on operating production Kubernetes at scale, ideally EKS on AWS.
• Strong cloud-native architecture experience on AWS (EC2, VPC, IAM, EKS).
• Experience with Infrastructure-as-Code (Terraform, Spacelift a plus) and GitOps-style deployment pipelines.
• Expert-level proficiency in Go or Python and production-grade Kubernetes tooling.

Responsibilities

• Architect and evolve Affirms EKS platform, driving strategy across cluster lifecycle and components.
• Lead provisioning, upgrades, and teardown through standardized IaC and self-service workflows.
• Own reliability of core shared components and the CI/CD pipeline that ships them.
• Define and enforce workload safety standards covering configuration, isolation, and blast radius.
• Build automation to move standards from research to policy-enforced defaults for new workloads.
• Establish observability, audits, and reporting to measure risk and track improvements.
• Collaborate with cluster-user teams to align workload needs with the platform.
• Drive cost and capacity strategy across node scaling and EC2 selection.
• Mentor engineers and set the bar for operational excellence.
• Participate in on-call, triage, and collaborate with SRE on incidents.

Skills

Kubernetes

EKS

Go

Python

Terraform

Spacelift

GitOps

IaC

Cloud AWS

Education

Bachelor’s degree in related field

Tools

Terraform

Spacelift

ArgoCD

kube-applier

Karpenter

Job description

Affirm, Inc. is seeking a senior engineer to architect and evolve our EKS platform across cluster lifecycle, provisioning, and shared components. You will own reliability, enforce workload safety, and lead automation from research to policy-enforced defaults for new workloads.

You will mentor engineers, drive observability and cost strategies, and collaborate with cross-functional teams to scale our Kubernetes footprint in a remote-first environment.