Staff Backend Engineer, Identity Platform (Remote)

Affirm, Inc.; Northern (KY); Hybrid; USD 230,000 - 290,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health coverage at no cost to you and

Monthly tech stipends for setup

Time off and holidays

Employee stock purchase plan (ESPP)

Job summary

AFFIRM is seeking a Staff Software Engineer, Backend (Identity Decisioning) to set technical strategy for a year and deliver high-impact identity tooling that powers checkout across markets outside North America.

You’ll collaborate with product, design and analytics to ensure technical sustainability, risk awareness, and clear trade-offs, while raising the bar on code quality, ownership, and on-call reliability.

Qualifications

• 8+ years designing, developing and launching backend systems at scale.
• Experience with Python or Kotlin in production.
• Track record of building highly available distributed systems using AWS, MySQL, Spark, Kubernetes.
• Ability to deliver major features with a technical and execution plan.
• Comfort with ambiguity and architecture-level thinking.
• Strong written and verbal communication for cross-functional teams.

Responsibilities

• Set technical strategy for your team on a year-long horizon.
• Collaborate with product, design & analytics to ensure sustainability, risks and trade-offs are understood.
• Act as a force-multiplier through design standards and advocacy beyond your team.
• Own your team’s operations and on-call readiness with monitoring, playbooks and alerting.
• Foster a culture of quality and ownership through code reviews and documentation.
• Mentor team members and lead by example.

Skills

Python

Kotlin

Backend design

Distributed systems

Education

Bachelor's degree or equivalent

Tools

AWS

MySQL

Spark

Kubernetes

Job description

AFFIRM is seeking a Staff Software Engineer, Backend (Identity Decisioning) to set technical strategy for a year and deliver high-impact identity tooling that powers checkout across markets outside North America.

You’ll collaborate with product, design and analytics to ensure technical sustainability, risk awareness, and clear trade-offs, while raising the bar on code quality, ownership, and on-call reliability.