Senior Staff Kubernetes Platform Architect (EKS)

Affirm, Inc.; Miami (FL); Remote; USD 236,000 - 296,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health coverage

Tech stipends

Flexible time off

Employee stock purchase plan

Job summary

Affirm, Inc. is building a secure, scalable Kubernetes platform and infrastructure to deploy and operate with confidence at scale.

The Compute Platform team owns the EKS foundation, standardizing the fleet, ensuring reliability, and enforcing workload safety through policy-driven defaults. You will architect and evolve the EKS platform, drive cluster provisioning via IaC and self-service workflows, own core shared components, advance observability, and mentor engineers across squads while

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 a proven track record building production-grade Kubernetes controllers, operators, and platform tooling that other engineering teams depend on
• Track record designing and enforcing standards across many teams without becoming a bottleneck
• 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 Affirms EKS platform, driving strategy across cluster lifecycle, node management, and shared cluster components
• Lead the technical direction for cluster provisioning, upgrades, and teardown through standardized IaC (Terraform, Spacelift) and self-service workflows
• Own the reliability of core shared components across the fleet (Karpenter, CoreDNS, VPC CNI, Kube Proxy, Metrics Server, etc) and the CI/CD pipeline that ships them consistently
• Define and enforce EKS workload safety standards covering resource configuration, workload isolation and blast radius, disruption tolerance (PDBs), Karpenter consolidation strategies, etc
• Build the enforcement and automation path that moves each standard from research and white-glove onboarding through broad adoption to policy-enforced defaults for new workloads
• Establish the observability, baseline audits, and reporting needed to identify hot spots and measure risk mitigation over time
• Partner with cluster-user teams (checkout, batch, ML, analytics, DevProd, etc) to understand workload needs and shape the platform accordingly
• Drive cost and capacity strategy across node scaling, bin packing, and EC2 instance selection
• Mentor engineers across the Compute Platform teams and set the bar for operational excellence
• Participate in the on-call rotation, triage and catalogue runtime K8s issues, and collaborate with SRE on production incidents

Skills

EKS/Kubernetes

Kubernetes automation

Workload reliability

Policy & governance

Go/Python

Leadership

Education

Bachelor's degree or equivalent

Tools

Terraform

Spacelift

ArgoCD

kube-applier

GitOps

Job description

Affirm, Inc. is building a secure, scalable Kubernetes platform and infrastructure to deploy and operate with confidence at scale.

The Compute Platform team owns the EKS foundation, standardizing the fleet, ensuring reliability, and enforcing workload safety through policy-driven defaults. You will architect and evolve the EKS platform, drive cluster provisioning via IaC and self-service workflows, own core shared components, advance observability, and mentor engineers across squads while