Senior Platform Engineer: EKS & Kubernetes at Scale

Affirm, Inc.; Portland (OR); Remote; USD 236,000 - 296,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health coverage for you and dependents

Tech stipend for setup and gear

Flexible time off

Employee stock purchase plan

Job summary

Affirm is seeking a Senior Kubernetes Platform Engineer to design and scale the EKS-based compute platform across regions. You will drive cluster lifecycle, IaC workflows, and policy-driven standards while partnering with platform and product teams to deliver reliable infrastructure.

This remote-first role emphasizes mentorship, on-call readiness, and cost-aware capacity planning for AWS workloads, with a comprehensive total compensation package including health coverage and equity opportunities.

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 controllers, operators, and platform tooling.
• Track record designing and enforcing standards across many teams without bottlenecks.
• Exceptional problem-solving and systems-thinking skills.
• Demonstrated leadership and cross-functional influence.
• This position requires either equivalent practical experience or a Bachelor’s degree in a related field.

Responsibilities

• Architect and evolve Affirm's EKS platform and cluster lifecycle strategy.
• Lead cluster provisioning, upgrades, and teardown via IaC and self-service workflows.
• Own the reliability of shared components (Karpenter, CoreDNS, VPC CNI, Kube Proxy, Metrics Server) and the CI/CD pipeline.
• Define workload safety standards including resource configs, isolation, and PDBs.
• Automate enforcement from research to policy-enforced defaults for new workloads.
• Establish observability, baseline audits, and risk-mitigation metrics over time.
• Collaborate with cluster-user teams to shape the platform according to workload needs.
• Drive cost and capacity strategy across node scaling and EC2 instance selection.
• Mentor engineers across Compute Platform teams and set the bar for operational excellence.
• Participate in on-call rotation and incident response with SRE.

Skills

EKS expertise

Kubernetes internals

Kubernetes fleet ops

Policy enforcement

Terraform

Go

Python

GitOps

SRE collaboration

Education

Bachelor's degree in a related field

Tools

Terraform

Spacelift

ArgoCD

kube-applier

Job description

Affirm is seeking a Senior Kubernetes Platform Engineer to design and scale the EKS-based compute platform across regions. You will drive cluster lifecycle, IaC workflows, and policy-driven standards while partnering with platform and product teams to deliver reliable infrastructure.

This remote-first role emphasizes mentorship, on-call readiness, and cost-aware capacity planning for AWS workloads, with a comprehensive total compensation package including health coverage and equity opportunities.