Senior Kubernetes Platform Engineer - EKS & Scale (Remote)

Affirm, Inc.; Boulder (CO); Remote; USD 236,000 - 325,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

100% health premiums coverage

Tech setup stipends

Flexible time off

Employee stock purchase plan

Job summary

Affirm, Inc. is seeking a senior Kubernetes Platform Engineer to architect and evolve the EKS-based Compute Platform.

You will drive cluster lifecycle, provisioning, upgrades, and teardown with Terraform, Spacelift, and self-service workflows, while owning the reliability of core components and CI/CD pipelines. You will enforce workload safety standards, build policy-driven enforcement, and establish observability with SLOs, metrics, and alerts.

Qualifications

• Deep EKS and Kubernetes internals expertise.
• Experience automating Kubernetes operations at fleet scale.
• Strong understanding of workload reliability patterns: probes, PDBs, topology and isolation.
• Experience designing and enforcing platform standards through policy (admission control, OPA/Gatekeeper).
• Infrastructure as Code fluency with Terraform and GitOps deployment pipelines.
• Observability: SLOs, metrics, logs and alerting.
• Cross-functional collaboration and mentorship across teams.
• Team leadership and capability to influence without bottlenecks.
• Equivalent practical experience or a Bachelor's degree in a related field.

Responsibilities

• Architect and evolve Affirms EKS platform across cluster lifecycle, node management, and shared components.
• Lead cluster provisioning, upgrades, and teardown through IaC and self-service workflows.
• Own the reliability of core shared components and the CI/CD pipeline that ships them.
• Define and enforce workload safety standards covering resource config, isolation, and blast radius.
• Move standards from research to policy-enforced defaults for new workloads.
• Establish observability, baseline audits, and reporting to measure risk over time.
• Partner with cluster-user teams to understand workload needs and shape the platform.
• Drive cost and capacity strategy across node scaling and EC2 instance selection.
• Mentor engineers and participate in on-call rotation and incident response.
• Collaborate with SRE on production incidents and performance improvements.

Skills

EKS and Kubernetes internals

Kubernetes fleet automation

Policy & governance

Terraform & GitOps

ArgoCD/kube-applier

Observability fundamentals

Cross-functional leadership

Go or Python production

Workload reliability patterns

Education

Bachelor's degree or equivalent practical experience

Tools

Terraform

Spacelift

ArgoCD

kube-applier

Job description

Affirm, Inc. is seeking a senior Kubernetes Platform Engineer to architect and evolve the EKS-based Compute Platform.

You will drive cluster lifecycle, provisioning, upgrades, and teardown with Terraform, Spacelift, and self-service workflows, while owning the reliability of core components and CI/CD pipelines. You will enforce workload safety standards, build policy-driven enforcement, and establish observability with SLOs, metrics, and alerts.