Senior Kubernetes Platform Lead - Remote, Equity & Benefits

Affirm, Inc.; Salt Lake City (UT); Remote; USD 236,000 - 296,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health coverage

Tech stipend

Time off

ESPP

Job summary

Affirm, Inc. is seeking a senior platform engineer to architect and evolve the EKS-based Compute Platform used across scalable services. You will lead provisioning, upgrades, and policy-driven automation, owning core components and the CI/CD pipeline.

You’ll enforce workload safety, drive observability, and mentor engineers while collaborating with multiple teams. The role emphasizes cross-functional leadership, IaC-driven workflows, and a strong focus on reliability and cost efficiency within a

Qualifications

• 10+ years in software or infrastructure engineering with delivery of complex platform solutions.
• 6+ years operating production Kubernetes at scale, preferably 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 Go or Python and production-grade Kubernetes tooling.
• Track record designing standards across many teams without bottlenecks.
• Leadership and cross-functional influence; equivalent practical experience or BA.

Responsibilities

• Architect and evolve Affirms EKS platform, driving strategy across cluster lifecycle and shared components.
• Lead the technical direction for cluster provisioning, upgrades, and teardown via IaC and self-service workflows.
• Own reliability of core components and the CI/CD pipeline that ships them.
• Define and enforce workload safety standards including PDBs and isolation strategies.
• Build automation to move standards from research to policy-enforced defaults.
• Establish observability, baseline audits, and reporting to measure risk mitigation.
• 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 set the bar for operational excellence; participate in on-call rotation.

Skills

EKS & Kubernetes

Go or Python

AWS (EC2, VPC, IAM)

Terraform

Spacelift

GitOps

ArgoCD/kube-applier

Kubernetes fleet automation

Observability & SRE collaboration

Leadership & mentorship

Education

Bachelor’s degree in related field

Tools

Terraform

Spacelift

ArgoCD

kube-applier

Job description

Affirm, Inc. is seeking a senior platform engineer to architect and evolve the EKS-based Compute Platform used across scalable services. You will lead provisioning, upgrades, and policy-driven automation, owning core components and the CI/CD pipeline.

You’ll enforce workload safety, drive observability, and mentor engineers while collaborating with multiple teams. The role emphasizes cross-functional leadership, IaC-driven workflows, and a strong focus on reliability and cost efficiency within a