Senior Staff Software Engineer, Backend (Compute Platform)

Affirm, Inc.; New York (NY); Remote; USD 236,000 - 325,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health coverage at no cost

Tech stipends and wellness

Generous time-off

Employee stock plan (ESPP)

Job summary

Affirm, Inc. is seeking a Senior Staff Software Engineer, Backend (Compute Platform) for remote US work. You will help evolve the EKS-based platform, drive cluster lifecycle, and own shared components and the CI/CD pipelines that deploy them.

You will mentor engineers across Compute Platform, enforce platform standards, and partner with product and SRE teams to ensure reliability and scalability at scale.

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).
• Experience with Terraform, Spacelift and GitOps-like deployment pipelines.
• Go or Python production experience; building Kubernetes controllers and tooling.
• Leadership across multiple teams and cross-functional influence.
• Ability to design and enforce platform standards and automation.

Responsibilities

• Architect and evolve the EKS platform, including cluster lifecycle and shared components.
• Lead provisioning, upgrades, and teardown via IaC and self-service workflows.
• Own reliability of core shared components across the fleet and CI/CD pipelines.
• Define workload safety standards, resource configuration, and blast radius controls.
• Build automation to move standards from research to policy-enforced defaults.
• Establish observability, baseline audits, and risk-mitigation reporting.
• Partner with cluster-user teams to shape platform needs.
• Drive cost and capacity strategy across node scaling and EC2 choices.
• Mentor engineers and participate in on-call rotations.

Skills

Kubernetes internals

EKS expertise

IaC automation

Go/Python

GitOps workflows

Cluster autoscaling

Terraform

Spacelift

ArgoCD

Kube-applier

Tools

Terraform

Spacelift

ArgoCD

Kube-applier

Job description

Senior Staff Software Engineer, Backend (Compute Platform)

Remote US

At Affim, we exist for the moments that matter—giving people a clear, predictable way to pay over time, with no hidden fees, no surprises, and no tradeoffs on what matters most.

Affirm's engineering team is building a large-scale, highly-available, and global infrastructure that is shared across multiple financial products. Ensuring that our infrastructure is accessible to all engineers is critical to the success of the business. We pride ourselves on our culture across engineering of engaging in thorough technical design review, operational excellence, and capable incident response and analysis.

The Compute Platform team owns the EKS foundation that affirm's products run on, from cluster provisioning and lifecycle through the safety standards that keep thousands of workloads reliable at scale. affirm operates 90+ EKS clusters across environments and regions, and this team is responsible for making that fleet standardized, automated, observable, and self-healing, while establishing and enforcing the workload configuration standards that protect availability. Our mission is to provide a secure, reliable, and scalable Kubernetes platform that lets infrastructure and application teams deploy and operate with confidence and minimal operational friction.

What you’ll do

As a member of the Compute Platform organization, you will collaborate with other teams - including Product, Infrastructure, Traffic, Cost & Capacity Engineering to:

• Architect and evolve affirm's 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

What we look for

• Deep EKS and Kubernetes internals expertise, including cluster upgrades, node lifecycle, scheduling, and autoscaling (Karpenter, Cluster Autoscaler)
• Demonstrated experience automating Kubernetes operations at fleet scale, from cluster provisioning, upgrades, and node lifecycle to self-healing remediation and policy-driven enforcement, replacing manual toil with auditable, self-service workflows
• Strong grasp of workload reliability patterns: resource tuning, probes, PDBs, topology and isolation constraints
• Experience designing and enforcing platform standards through policy (admission control, OPA/Gatekeeper or equivalent) and automated frameworks
• Infrastructure as Code fluency with Terraform and a GitOps or pipeline-driven delivery model (ArgoCD, kube-applier, or similar)
• Observability instincts: defining SLOs, building metrics, logs, and alerting coverage, and running data-driven baseline audits
• Cross-functional collaboration skills with platform, product, SRE, and capacity teams
• Demonstrated mentorship and technical leadership across teams
• Drive to track emerging Kubernetes community best practices and adapt them to affirm's needs

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

Base Pay Grade- R

Equity Grade- 15

Employees new to affirm typically come in at the start of the pay range. affirm focuses on providing a simple and transparent pay structure which is based on a variety of factors, including location, experience and job‑related skills.

Base pay is part of a total compensation package that may include equity rewards, monthly stipends for health, wellness and tech spending, and benefits (including 100% subsidized medical coverage, dental and vision for you and your dependents.)

USA base pay range (CA, WA, NY, NJ, CT) per year: $265,000 - $325,000

USA base pay range (all other U.S. states) per year: $236,000 - $296,000

Remote-first with flexibility built in

affirm is proud to be a remote‑first company. Most roles can be done from almost anywhere within the country of employment. Some positions may occasionally require in‑person work at an affirm office, and a few are office‑based due to the nature of the work. All new hires will be invited to attend an in‑person onboarding experience.

Benefits designed for you

Our benefits reflect our commitment to care, transparency, and flexibility. Here are a few highlights:

• Health coverage at no cost: We cover 100% of premiums for employees and their dependents.
• Spending stipends: Monthly stipends support your tech setup, and the ability to choose health and wellness options that are right for you.
• Time off to recharge: Flexible time off and generous holiday calendars help you rest when you need to.
• Own a piece of what you build: Our employee stock purchase plan (ESPP) lets you buy affirm stock at a discount.

We’re committed to providing an inclusive interview process, including accommodations for candidates with disabilities. If you need support, we’re happy to help.

For positions based in San Francisco or Los Angeles: affirm considers qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records, as required by law.

Demographic Survey Statement (US‑based roles)

affirm is dedicated to building an inclusive culture where affirmers belong and have an equal opportunity to thrive.

To help us assess our outreach efforts, we invite candidates to voluntarily share information through a short demographic survey. This information is:

• Completely optional
• Anonymized and stored in aggregate
• Not accessible to recruiters or hiring managers at the individual level
• Never used in any hiring decision

Your decision to provide or withhold this information will not impact your candidacy in any way.

How do you identify? (gender identity) Select...

How do you identify? (race/ethnicity) Select...

Voluntary Self-Identification

For government reporting purposes, we ask candidates to respond to the below self-identification survey.Completion of the form is entirely voluntary. Whatever your decision, it will not be considered in the hiringprocess or thereafter. Any information that you do provide will be recorded and maintained in aconfidential file.

As set forth in affirm’s Equal Employment Opportunity policy,we do not discriminate on the basis of any protected group status under any applicable law.

If you believe you belong to any of the categories of protected veterans listed below, please indicate by making the appropriate selection.As a government contractor subject to the Vietnam Era Veterans Readjustment Assistance Act (VEVRAA), we request this information in order to measurethe effectiveness of the outreach and positive recruitment efforts we undertake pursuant to VEVRAA. Classification of protected categoriesis as follows:

A "disabled veteran" is one of the following: a veteran of the U.S. military, ground, naval or air service who is entitled to compensation (or who but for the receipt of military retired pay would be entitled to compensation) under laws administered by the Secretary of Veterans Affairs; or a person who was discharged or released from active duty because of a service-connected disability.

A "recently separated veteran" means any veteran during the three-year period beginning on the date of such veteran's discharge or release from active duty in the U.S. military, ground, naval, or air service.

An "active duty wartime or campaign badge veteran" means a veteran who served on active duty in the U.S. military, ground, naval or air service during a war, or in a campaign or expedition for which a campaign badge has been authorized under the laws administered by the Department of Defense.

An "Armed forces service medal veteran" means a veteran who, while serving on active duty in the U.S. military, ground, naval or air service, participated in a United States military operation for which an Armed Forces service medal was awarded pursuant to Executive Order 12985.