Senior Staff Kubernetes Platform Engineer - Remote-First

Affirm, Inc.; Sioux Falls (SD); Remote; USD 236,000 - 325,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health coverage for you & dependents

Tech stipends for setup

Flexible time off

Employee stock purchase plan

Job summary

Affirm, Inc. is seeking a senior platform engineer to evolve our EKS-based compute platform. You’ll drive cluster lifecycle, provisioning, upgrades, and self-service workflows, while securing workload safety and automating policy enforcement.

You will own core components and build observability, SLOs, and baselines. Strong collaboration with product and SRE teams is essential, with a remote-first culture and competitive equity.

Qualifications

• 10+ years in software or infrastructure engineering with complex platform delivery.
• 6+ years operating production Kubernetes at scale, ideally EKS on AWS.
• Strong cloud-native architecture on AWS (EC2, VPC, IAM, EKS).
• IaC fluency with Terraform; GitOps pipelines (ArgoCD, kube-applier).
• Go or Python production-grade Kubernetes tooling experience.

Responsibilities

• Architect and evolve EKS platform strategy for cluster lifecycle and shared components.
• Lead provisioning, upgrades, and teardown via IaC and self-service/workflows.
• Own reliability of core components (Karpenter, CoreDNS, VPC CNI, Kube Proxy, Metrics Server).
• Define security and workload safety standards (PDBs, resource config).
• Automate standards adoption from research to policy-enforced defaults.
• Collaborate with cluster-user teams to align workload needs.

Skills

EKS Kubernetes internals

Fleet-scale automation

Workload reliability patterns

Platform standards enforcement

Terraform Spacelift ArgoCD

Observability and SLOs

Cross-functional collaboration

Leadership and mentoring

Education

Bachelor's degree or equivalent

Tools

Terraform

Spacelift

ArgoCD

kube-applier

Kubernetes controllers/operators

Job description

Affirm, Inc. is seeking a senior platform engineer to evolve our EKS-based compute platform. You’ll drive cluster lifecycle, provisioning, upgrades, and self-service workflows, while securing workload safety and automating policy enforcement.

You will own core components and build observability, SLOs, and baselines. Strong collaboration with product and SRE teams is essential, with a remote-first culture and competitive equity.