Staff Engineer — AI-First Banking Platform

Affirm; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 230,000 - 290,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health, dental, and vision coverage

Employee Stock Purchase Plan

Flexible spending wallets

Remote-first with office options

Job summary

Affirm is building its own bank, and this Staff Software Engineer role is a senior, hands-on position shaping the core systems behind Affirm’s banking platform. You will own architecture, drive technical strategy, and raise the bar for a deliberately small, AI-native team responsible for cloud, data, and bank integrations.

You will set standards, mentor engineers, and push AI-enabled tooling across design, runbooks, and operations while maintaining regulatory alignment and audit-ready practices.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of software engineering with staff-level ownership of high-stakes systems.
• Ability to own ambiguity at scale, prioritize, and balance speed with judgment.
• Experience using AI tools to drive development and operations.
• Regulated environment experience and ability to work with examiners.
• Excellent written and verbal communication with executives.

Responsibilities

• Set technical direction for bank systems and surface areas.
• Design, build, integrate, and operate high-stakes stack components.
• Establish patterns and standards for a small team.
• Ship AI-first capabilities and leverage AI tools in engineering.
• Lead vendor evaluation and integration with third-party platforms.
• Define integration boundary with affirm Inc and ensure compliance.
• Own operational posture: reliability, observability, runbooks.
• Mentor engineers and contribute to hiring.
• Communicate strategy to executives and engineers.
• Grow the team and raise the bar.

Skills

Software engineering

Ownership

AI fluency

Cloud infrastructure

IaC (Terraform)

Communication

Regulated environment experience

Job description

Affirm is building its own bank, and this Staff Software Engineer role is a senior, hands-on position shaping the core systems behind Affirm’s banking platform. You will own architecture, drive technical strategy, and raise the bar for a deliberately small, AI-native team responsible for cloud, data, and bank integrations.

You will set standards, mentor engineers, and push AI-enabled tooling across design, runbooks, and operations while maintaining regulatory alignment and audit-ready practices.