Staff Engineer: AI-First Banking Platform

Affirm; Baltimore (MD); On-site; USD 204,000 - 290,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Remote-first company

Competitive salary

Health, dental, vision coverage

Employee Stock Purchase Plan

Flexible spending wallets

Generous PTO & holidays

Job summary

Affirm is building its own bank and seeks a Staff Software Engineer to anchor a small, AI‑native engineering team. You will own the hardest, high‑stakes systems end‑to‑end, shape architecture and strategy, and drive vendor relationships while maintaining strict regulatory alignment.

You’ll lead reliability, runbooks, AI‑driven workflows, and cross‑functional collaboration with Legal, Compliance, Risk, and Audit to ensure audit readiness and secure operations.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of software engineering experience with end-to-end ownership.
• Ability to set architecture and multi-quarter technical strategy.
• Experience owning high-stakes systems end-to-end through launch and operations.
• Comfort working in a regulated banking/fintech environment with audit needs.
• Proven ability to communicate strategy to executives and non‑engineering stakeholders.

Responsibilities

• Set technical direction for the bank's systems, including cloud infra and data platforms.
• Own the hardest problems end-to-end, including incident response and runbooks.
• Establish patterns and standards to enable a small team to scale impact.
• Ship AI-first capabilities and leverage AI in engineering workflows.
• Lead vendor selection, integration, and ongoing operations across core stacks.
• Define integration boundaries with affirm Inc and ensure regulatory separation.
• Partner with Legal, Compliance, Risk, and Internal Audit to bake compliance in.
• Own operational posture: reliability, observability, and disaster recovery.

Skills

Software architecture

AI-assisted development

Cloud infrastructure

CI/CD

Leadership without mgmt

Tools

AWS

Terraform

Snowflake

Kubernetes

Job description

Affirm is building its own bank and seeks a Staff Software Engineer to anchor a small, AI‑native engineering team. You will own the hardest, high‑stakes systems end‑to‑end, shape architecture and strategy, and drive vendor relationships while maintaining strict regulatory alignment.

You’ll lead reliability, runbooks, AI‑driven workflows, and cross‑functional collaboration with Legal, Compliance, Risk, and Audit to ensure audit readiness and secure operations.