Staff Backend Engineer, Cost & FinOps Automation (Remote)

Affirm; United States; On-site; USD 129,000 - 172,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health coverage

ESPP

Remote-first company

Flexible stipends

Job summary

Affirm is hiring a Staff Cost Engineer to own cost governance across a fast-growing multi-cloud and multi-AI-vendor footprint. You will design tooling and automation to scale cost visibility, anomaly detection, and savings reporting across AWS, Snowflake, and internal data platforms.

You will lead a small, high-leverage team, set technical direction, and partner with infra and platform leaders to drive cost strategy. Strong coding and collaboration skills are essential.

Qualifications

• 8+ years designing, developing and launching backend systems at scale.
• Proven track record of highly available distributed systems.
• Experience with FinOps or cost-visibility platforms and dashboards.
• Automation tooling to scale cost reviews.
• Hands-on cloud billing data experience, SQL modeling.

Responsibilities

• Set technical strategy for team on a year-long horizon.
• Collaborate across product/analytics for sustainable solutions.
• Act as force-multiplier by defining technical solutions and processes.
• Own team operations, monitoring, playbooks, and on-call readiness.
• Set coding standards and advocate them beyond the team.
• Mentor and develop team members with feedback.

Skills

Python

Kotlin

AWS

MySQL

Spark

Kubernetes

FinOps

Automation tooling

SQL

Distributed systems

Communication

Tools

Terraform

Snowflake

Kubecost

CloudHealth

FinOut

Job description

Affirm is hiring a Staff Cost Engineer to own cost governance across a fast-growing multi-cloud and multi-AI-vendor footprint. You will design tooling and automation to scale cost visibility, anomaly detection, and savings reporting across AWS, Snowflake, and internal data platforms.

You will lead a small, high-leverage team, set technical direction, and partner with infra and platform leaders to drive cost strategy. Strong coding and collaboration skills are essential.