Staff Software Engineer — AI-First Banking Platform

Affirm; Detroit (MI); On-site; USD 204,000 - 264,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

100% employer-subsidized medical, dent

Stock purchase plan

Flexible spending accounts

Job summary

Affirm is building its own bank and seeks a Staff Software Engineer to anchor a small, AI-native team responsible for vendor-integrated banking infrastructure, the data platform, and tooling. You will set technical direction across that surface area and own the hardest problems with direct exposure to senior leadership.

This role requires leading architecture, standards, and technical strategy while mentoring engineers and driving AI-enabled development.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of software engineering experience with staff-level responsibilities and a track record of owning ambiguous, high-stakes systems end-to-end through launch and operations.
• Comfortable owning ambiguity at the largest scale on the team and balancing speed with engineering judgment.
• Hungry to leverage AI to drive outcomes with AI-assisted development tools and agentic workflows.
• Bias toward simplicity with a default-deny security posture and standalone-operability.
• Track record of setting technical direction and leading multi-quarter architecture across engineers.
• Deep systems thinking across cloud infrastructure (AWS preferred), IaC (Terraform), and data platforms (Snowflake).
• Regulated-environment experience in banking/payments or similar, with examiner-facing documentation.

Responsibilities

• Set technical direction across the bank's systems, including cloud infrastructure, data platform, core banking configuration, CI/CD, networking, and integrations.
• Own the hardest problems end-to-end, design, build, integrate, operate, and own incident response with clear failure domains.
• Be the force multiplier on a small team, establish patterns and standards, and elevate engineers who join.
• Ship AI-first, pushing AI-leveraged engineering capabilities and runbooks.
• Lead vendor selection, integration, and ongoing oversight of third-party platforms across core stacks.
• Define integration boundaries with affirm Inc, ensuring seamless operation inside the ecosystem while preserving regulatory separation.
• Build for examiners by partnering with Legal, Compliance, Risk, and Audit to ensure design is audit-ready.
• Own operational posture: reliability, observability, alerting, runbooks, and disaster recovery for standalone bank operations.
• Influence across org, communicating strategy to executives and engineers, and mentor peers.
• Grow the team and raise the bar through hiring and leadership by example.

Skills

Software engineering

Ambiguity ownership

AI-enabled development

Cloud infrastructure

Executive communication

Mentoring

Tools

AWS

Terraform

Snowflake

Job description

Affirm is building its own bank and seeks a Staff Software Engineer to anchor a small, AI-native team responsible for vendor-integrated banking infrastructure, the data platform, and tooling. You will set technical direction across that surface area and own the hardest problems with direct exposure to senior leadership.

This role requires leading architecture, standards, and technical strategy while mentoring engineers and driving AI-enabled development.