Senior Staff Kubernetes Platform Engineer (Remote-First)

Affirm, Inc.; Richmond (VA); 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 seeking an experienced Platform Engineer to lead the EKS-based compute platform that powers our global infrastructure. You will drive cluster provisioning, upgrades, and safety standards across fleets, building self-service IaC and policy-driven tooling.

Join a remote-first environment, mentor engineers, and shape cost, capacity, and reliability strategies while collaborating with cross-functional teams to deliver scalable, observable platforms.

Qualifications

• 10+ years in software or infrastructure engineering.
• 6+ years operating production Kubernetes at scale (ideally AWS EKS).
• Strong cloud-native architecture on AWS (EC2, VPC, IAM, EKS).
• Experience with Infrastructure-as-Code (Terraform, Spacelift) and GitOps pipelines.

Responsibilities

• Architect and evolve EKS platform across cluster lifecycle and shared components.
• Lead provisioning, upgrades, and teardown via IaC and self-service workflows.
• Own reliability of core shared components (Karpenter, CoreDNS, VPC CNI, etc.).
• Define and enforce EKS workload safety standards (PDBs, isolation).
• Build automation to move standards from research to policy-enforced defaults.
• Establish observability, audits, and reporting for risk mitigation.
• Collaborate with cluster-user teams to shape the platform.
• Drive cost and capacity strategy for node scaling and EC2 selection.
• Mentor Compute Platform engineers and drive operational excellence.
• Participate in on-call rotations and incident collaboration.

Skills

EKS internals

Kubernetes fleet operations

Org-wide policy enforcement

Terraform/Spacelift

GitOps tooling (ArgoCD/kube-applier)

Go or Python production-grade coding

Leadership & cross-functional impact

Bachelor or equivalent experience

Education

Bachelor’s degree or equivalent experience

Tools

Terraform

Spacelift

ArgoCD

kube-applier

Job description

Affirm, Inc. is seeking an experienced Platform Engineer to lead the EKS-based compute platform that powers our global infrastructure. You will drive cluster provisioning, upgrades, and safety standards across fleets, building self-service IaC and policy-driven tooling.

Join a remote-first environment, mentor engineers, and shape cost, capacity, and reliability strategies while collaborating with cross-functional teams to deliver scalable, observable platforms.