Senior Staff Kubernetes Platform Engineer – Remote

Affirm, Inc.; Phoenix (AZ); Remote; USD 236,000 - 325,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Remote-friendly environment

Health and wellness stipends

Tech setup stipends

ESPP stock purchase

Job summary

Affirm is seeking an experienced Platform Engineer to lead and evolve our EKS-based compute platform. You will drive cluster lifecycle strategy, standardize provisioning, upgrades, and teardown using IaC and self-service workflows, and own the reliability of core components and CI/CD pipelines across the fleet.

The role requires deep Kubernetes, Go/Python experience, and a track record of designing platform standards, with remote-first flexibility and strong collaboration with cross-functional

Qualifications

• 10+ years in software or infrastructure engineering.
• 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.

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 and self-service workflows.
• Own the reliability of core shared components across the fleet 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, and consolidation strategies.
• Build the enforcement and automation path from research to policy-enforced defaults for new workloads.
• Establish observability, baseline audits, and reporting to identify hot spots and measure risk over time.
• Partner with cluster-user teams 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 Compute Platform teams and set the bar for operational excellence.
• Participate in on-call rotation, triage and catalog runtime K8s issues, and collaborate with SRE on production incidents.

Skills

EKS/Kubernetes internals

Fleet-scale automation

Policy-driven enforcement

Terraform & GitOps

Go or Python production-grade

Leadership & mentorship

Cloud-native AWS

Education

Bachelor’s degree or equivalent

Tools

Terraform

Spacelift

ArgoCD

Kubernetes tooling

Job description

Affirm is seeking an experienced Platform Engineer to lead and evolve our EKS-based compute platform. You will drive cluster lifecycle strategy, standardize provisioning, upgrades, and teardown using IaC and self-service workflows, and own the reliability of core components and CI/CD pipelines across the fleet.

The role requires deep Kubernetes, Go/Python experience, and a track record of designing platform standards, with remote-first flexibility and strong collaboration with cross-functional