Staff Backend Engineer — Scalable, Reliable Systems (Remote)

Affirm; United States; Remote; USD 181,000 - 241,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health coverage for you and dependents

Flexible Spending Wallets

Employee stock purchase plan (ESPP)

Job summary

Affirm is reinventing credit to offer honest, consumer-friendly buy now, pay later options with transparent terms. The Capacity Modeling team translates demand forecasts into capacity plans, mapping traffic to resources and sizing across regions.

This remote-first role focuses on strategic leadership, scalable architectures, and cross-functional collaboration to ensure reliability during peak events. Base pay ranges widely by location; the advertised range is 181,000–241,000 USD per year.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of experience designing, developing and launching backend systems at scale.
• Experience with highly available distributed systems using AWS, MySQL, Spark and Kubernetes.
• Experience supporting scale events like Prime Day / Black Friday.
• Knowledge of autoscaling, CPU/Memory tuning for compute workloads.
• Ability to deliver major features with clear execution plans.
• Comfort navigating from low level code to large system architecture.
• Strong written and spoken communication for cross-functional collaboration.

Responsibilities

• Set technical strategy for a year-long horizon for the team.
• Collaborate with product, design & analytics across the lifecycle.
• Define and advocate technical solutions and operational processes.
• Own team operations and on-call readiness with playbooks and alerts.
• Establish code review and design standards and share them broadly.
• Mentor teammates and lead by example.

Tools

Python

Kotlin

AWS

MySQL

Spark

Kubernetes

Job description

Affirm is reinventing credit to offer honest, consumer-friendly buy now, pay later options with transparent terms. The Capacity Modeling team translates demand forecasts into capacity plans, mapping traffic to resources and sizing across regions.

This remote-first role focuses on strategic leadership, scalable architectures, and cross-functional collaboration to ensure reliability during peak events. Base pay ranges widely by location; the advertised range is 181,000–241,000 USD per year.