Staff Backend Engineer, Platform - Remote

Affirm; Houston (TX); On-site; USD 204,000 - 290,000; Full time

Job summary

Affirm is reinventing credit to make it more honest and friendly, enabling customers to buy now and pay later with no hidden fees or compounded interest.

As a Staff Software Engineer on the Order Platform team, you will shape systems powering affirm purchases post-checkout — orders, captures, refunds, and settlement — and drive the technical strategy for reliability at scale. You’ll mentor engineers and own decisions with long-term impact.

Qualifications

• 8+ years designing, developing and launching backend systems at scale using Python or Kotlin.
• Track record of highly available distributed systems using AWS, MySQL, Spark and Kubernetes.
• Experience designing services with clear API boundaries, reliability, idempotency, and failure modes (payments/fintech domain).
• Delivered major features or deprecations with a solid technical/execution plan; writes high quality, maintainable code.
• Growth trajectory showing feedback gathering from engineering and cross-functional peers.
• Strong verbal and written communication for global teams.
• Equivalent practical experience or Bachelor’s degree in a related field.

Responsibilities

• Set technical strategy for your team on a year-long horizon and align with business impact.
• Collaborate across product management, design and analytics for sustainability, risks, and trade-offs.
• Act as a force-multiplier by defining solutions and operational processes.
• Own team operations and availability with monitoring, on-call rotations, runbooks, and testing.
• Establish code review and design standards and advocate across teams.
• Mentor engineers and lead by example to develop talent.

Skills

Backend design

Python

Kotlin

Distributed systems

API boundaries

Reliability

Education

Bachelor's degree in related field

Tools

AWS

MySQL

Spark

Kubernetes

Job description

Affirm is reinventing credit to make it more honest and friendly, enabling customers to buy now and pay later with no hidden fees or compounded interest.

As a Staff Software Engineer on the Order Platform team, you will shape systems powering affirm purchases post-checkout — orders, captures, refunds, and settlement — and drive the technical strategy for reliability at scale. You’ll mentor engineers and own decisions with long-term impact.