Staff Software Engineer — AI‑First Banking Platform Architect

Affirm; New York (NY); On-site; USD 230,000 - 290,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Full medical, dental & vision coverage

Flexible spending wallets

Competitive vacation & holidays

Employee stock purchase plan

Job summary

Affirm is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to anchor AI-native banking infrastructure and data platforms. You will own architecture, standards, and the technical strategy across vendor integrations and core surfaces, with exposure to senior leadership.

You'll design and operate the most critical, high-stakes components, establish runbooks, and guide a small team toward robust, auditable solutions in a bank chartered environment.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of software engineering experience with staff-level credentials and ownership of high-stakes systems end-to-end.
• Ability to own ambiguity and make architecture and prioritization decisions at scale.
• Leverage AI to drive outcomes and push AI-enabled development practices.
• Experience with cloud infrastructure, IaC, and data platforms.
• Familiarity with regulated environments (banking/payments) and audit readiness.
• Excellent written and verbal communication to executives and non-engineers.

Responsibilities

• Set technical direction for the bank's systems and define long-term strategy for core surfaces (cloud infra, data platform, CI/CD).
• Own the hardest problems end-to-end, design and operate high-stakes components with clear failure domains.
• Set the bar for code/design review and documentation for a small high-skill team.
• Ship AI-first capabilities and push the frontier of AI-enabled engineering.
• Lead vendor selection, integration, and ongoing platform oversight.
• Define the integration boundary with affirm inc and ensure regulatory separation.
• Build for examiners by collaborating with legal, compliance, risk, and audit teams.
• Own operational posture including reliability, observability, alerting, and runbooks.
• Influence stakeholders across the organization and communicate strategy clearly.
• Mentor engineers, contribute to hiring, and raise the bar as the team grows.

Skills

Staff-level engineer

Ownership

AI-powered development

Cloud infrastructure

Banking/regulatory domain

Executive communication

Vendor management

Tools

AWS

Terraform

Snowflake

Job description

Affirm is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to anchor AI-native banking infrastructure and data platforms. You will own architecture, standards, and the technical strategy across vendor integrations and core surfaces, with exposure to senior leadership.

You'll design and operate the most critical, high-stakes components, establish runbooks, and guide a small team toward robust, auditable solutions in a bank chartered environment.