Senior Software Engineer, Backend (Platform Reliability)

Affirm; Poland (ME); Remote; USD 81,000 - 110,000; Full time

Job summary

A pioneering financial technology company is seeking a Senior Software Engineer to enhance their Infrastructure Platform Engineering team. The role focuses on ensuring system resilience in scalable, cloud-native environments. Candidates should have substantial backend development experience, strong expertise in AWS and Kubernetes, and excellent communication skills. This position offers flexibility in remote work, alongside competitive compensation and benefits.

Benefits

Flexible Spending Wallets

Wellness days

Learning & Development programs

Healthcare coverage

Qualifications

• 5+ years of experience as a software engineer.
• Experience designing, developing, and launching backend systems at scale.
• Strong verbal and written communication skills.

Responsibilities

• Own and deliver quarterly goals for your team.
• Collaborate with product management and design.
• Identify and advocate for project or business issues.

Skills

Backend development at scale

Experience with Python

Experience with Kotlin

Experience with AWS

Experience with MySQL

Use of Kubernetes

Strong communication skills

Job description

Overview

Affirm is reinventing credit to make it more honest and friendly, giving consumers the flexibility to buy now and pay later without any hidden fees or compounding interest. We are seeking a Senior Software Engineer to join our Infrastructure Platform Engineering team, focusing on incident response, observability, automation, and system resilience in highly scalable, cloud-native environments. You will work on proactive failure mitigation, operational tooling, service scaling strategies, and on-call effectiveness to ensure low-latency, highly available services across Affirm\'s compute, storage, CI/CD, and observability stacks. Platform Reliability Engineering helps our Engineering partners to "Operate What They Own" with excellence by defining frameworks and best practices for operating applications, building tooling, and providing training and consulting services.

Affirm is scaling fast, and this role will help ensure our platform’s resilience as we operate across multiple regions.

What You'll Do

• You will own and deliver quarterly goals for your team, lead engineers through ambiguity to solve open-ended problems, and ensure that everyone is supported throughout delivery.
• You will collaborate with product management, design, and analytics by participating in ideation, articulating technical constraints, and partnering on decisions that properly consider risks and trade-offs.
• You will proactively identify project, process, technology or business issues, advocate for them, and lead in solving them.
• You will support the operations and availability of your team’s artifacts by creating and monitoring metrics, escalating when needed, and supporting on-call efforts.
• You will foster a culture of quality and ownership by setting or improving code review and design standards, and advocating for them beyond your team through writing and tech talks.
• You will help develop talent on your team by providing feedback and guidance, and leading by example.

What We Look For

• You have 5+ years of experience as a software engineer.
• You have designed, developed, and launched backend systems at scale using technologies like Python, Kotlin, AWS, and MySQL.
• You leverage Kubernetes for cloud compute orchestration and troubleshooting.
• You have experience with traffic management to ensure scalable, reliable, and high-performance platform operations (especially in AWS).
• You have experience shipping web apps using declarative UI frameworks like React or Vue.
• You ensure high availability and resilience of critical services through runbooks, incident response strategies, and post-mortem analysis.
• You partner with Observability and Reliability teams to proactively detect and mitigate outages; you define a technical plan for delivery of significant features with elegant, simple, extensible designs; you write high quality, maintainable code.
• You automate operational tasks, deployments, failover processes, and scaling strategies to reduce manual intervention; you make significant changes in large codebases and develop tools to enable safe changes.
• You partner with Storage & Replication, Cloud, CI/CD, and Security teams to meet high operational standards, and you take ownership of your growth by seeking feedback from your team and stakeholders.
• You have strong verbal and written communication skills for effective collaboration with a global engineering team.

Compensation & Benefits

Base Pay Grade: N; Equity Grade: Poland 4. Affirm focuses on a simple, transparent pay structure based on location, experience, and skills. Base pay is part of a total compensation package including health, wellness, tech spending stipends, and benefits, with potential equity rewards.

Base pay in Poland per year: 301,000 zł - 401,000 zł. This role is eligible for creative tax benefits where permitted by law and policy.

• Type of employment: Contract of Employment
• Flexible Spending Wallets for tech, food, and lifestyle
• Away Days – wellness days to take time off
• Learning & Development programs
• Parental benefit
• Employee Resource & Community Groups

Location: Remote Poland. The majority of roles can be located anywhere in Poland. This job description is not contractual. #LI-Remote

Affirm is a remote-first company. While most roles are remote, occasional office presence may be required. Some roles are office-based due to job responsibilities. Benefits include healthcare coverage for you and dependents, flexible spending wallets, vacation and holidays, and an employee stock purchase plan.

Affirm is committed to an inclusive interview experience and provides reasonable accommodations during hiring. For U.S. positions in Los Angeles or San Francisco, Affirm will consider applicants with arrest or conviction records in compliance with applicable ordinances. By submitting an application, you acknowledge having read the Global Candidate Privacy Notice and consent to processing as described therein.