Staff Engineer, AI-First Banking Platform

Affirm; Chicago (IL); On-site; USD 204,000 - 290,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Remote-friendly

Health benefits

Equity rewards

Job summary

Affirm is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to anchor a small, AI-native team building and operating the bank’s core systems. You will define architectural direction across cloud infrastructure, data platform, and third‑party integrations, while owning the most critical, high‑stakes components and ensuring audit-friendly, reliable operations.

You will drive vendor relationships, implement robust runbooks, and mentor engineers to raise the bar as the bank expands within a regulated environment.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of software engineering experience with staff-level ownership of high-stakes systems.
• Ability to own ambiguity at large scale and drive architecture decisions beyond individual projects.
• Fluency with AI-assisted development tools and interdisciplinary AI workflows.

Responsibilities

• Set technical direction for bank surface areas and architecture.
• Own hard problems end-to-end from design to operations and incident response.
• Lead code/design reviews and establish patterns for a small high-impact team.
• Ship AI-first capabilities and push the frontier of AI-enabled engineering.

Skills

Staff-level

Ambiguity handling

AI tooling fluency

Executive communication

Cloud infrastructure

Tools

AWS

Terraform

Snowflake

Job description

Affirm is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to anchor a small, AI-native team building and operating the bank’s core systems. You will define architectural direction across cloud infrastructure, data platform, and third‑party integrations, while owning the most critical, high‑stakes components and ensuring audit-friendly, reliable operations.

You will drive vendor relationships, implement robust runbooks, and mentor engineers to raise the bar as the bank expands within a regulated environment.