Senior Staff Kubernetes Platform Engineer - Remote-First

Affirm, Inc.; Charlotte (NC); Remote; USD 236,000 - 325,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health coverage for employees and your

Tech setup stipends

Flexible time off

Employee stock purchase plan

Job summary

Affirm, a leading pay-over-time platform, is seeking a Senior Platform Engineer to own and evolve our EKS-based Compute Platform. You will drive cluster lifecycle, node management, and shared components while enforcing safety standards and policy-driven automation.

You’ll work with Terraform, Spacelift, ArgoCD, and Karpenter in a remote-first environment, mentoring teams and shaping scalable infrastructure across regions. Strong Go/Python skills and AWS experience are required.

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) and GitOps-style deployment pipelines
• Expert-level proficiency in Go or Python and production-grade Kubernetes controllers/operators
• Track record designing and enforcing standards across many teams without bottlenecks
• Exceptional problem-solving and systems-thinking skills
• Demonstrated leadership and cross-functional influence
• Bachelor’s degree or equivalent practical experience or related field

Responsibilities

• Architect and evolve Affirms EKS platform, driving strategy across cluster lifecycle and node management
• Lead the technical direction for cluster provisioning, upgrades, and teardown via IaC and self-service workflows
• Own the reliability of core shared components and the CI/CD pipeline that ships them
• Define and enforce EKS workload safety standards including resource config and blast radius
• Build automation to move standards from research to policy-enforced defaults
• Establish observability, 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 instance selection
• Mentor engineers across Compute Platform and set the bar for ops excellence
• Participate in on-call rotation and collaborate with SRE on incidents

Skills

EKS internals

Kubernetes at scale

Terraform

GitOps

Go or Python

Policy enforcement

Observability basics

Cross-functional collaboration

Leadership

Incident response

Education

Bachelor’s degree or equivalent

Tools

ArgoCD

Spacelift

Kube-applier

Karpenter

Terraform

Job description

Affirm, a leading pay-over-time platform, is seeking a Senior Platform Engineer to own and evolve our EKS-based Compute Platform. You will drive cluster lifecycle, node management, and shared components while enforcing safety standards and policy-driven automation.

You’ll work with Terraform, Spacelift, ArgoCD, and Karpenter in a remote-first environment, mentoring teams and shaping scalable infrastructure across regions. Strong Go/Python skills and AWS experience are required.