Staff Backend Engineer, Trust & Safety Foundations — Remote

Affirm; Seattle (WA); Remote; USD 230,000 - 290,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health coverage

Tech stipends

Flexible time off

ESPP

Job summary

Affirm is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to lead the Trust and Safety Foundations team within Checkout Engineering. You will shape technical strategy, drive high-impact initiatives, and raise the bar for system design and engineering quality across stakeholders.

You will own the roadmap for backend systems, collaborate with product management, design, and analytics, and mentor engineers while delivering reliable, scalable platforms that power Affirm’s mission.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of experience designing, developing and launching backend systems at scale.
• Proven experience with Python or Kotlin.
• Strong track record building highly available distributed systems with AWS, MySQL, Spark and Kubernetes.
• Ability to write high-quality, maintainable code and to drive architecture decisions.
• Comfort with ambiguity and the ability to navigate large system designs.
• Strong communication, collaboration, and feedback skills with cross-functional partners.
• Bachelor's degree or equivalent practical experience.

Responsibilities

• Set technical strategy for the team on a year‑long timescale and align it with critical projects.
• Collaborate across product, design, and analytics to ensure sustainability and risk management.
• Act as a force multiplier by defining and promoting effective technical solutions and processes.
• Own the team's operations, monitoring, on-call readiness, and incident response playbooks.
• Raise quality standards through code review practices and architectural governance beyond the team.
• Mentor teammates, provide feedback, and lead by example.

Skills

Python

Kotlin

Backend design

Distributed systems

Education

Bachelor's degree or equivalent

Tools

AWS

MySQL

Apache Spark

Kubernetes

Job description

Affirm is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to lead the Trust and Safety Foundations team within Checkout Engineering. You will shape technical strategy, drive high-impact initiatives, and raise the bar for system design and engineering quality across stakeholders.

You will own the roadmap for backend systems, collaborate with product management, design, and analytics, and mentor engineers while delivering reliable, scalable platforms that power Affirm’s mission.