Staff Software Engineer – AI‑First Banking Systems

Affirm; Charlotte (NC); On-site; USD 204,000 - 264,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical coverage

Dental coverage

Vision coverage

Equity rewards

Remote-first

Job summary

Affirm is hiring a Staff Software Engineer to anchor a small, AI-native team building the bank's core systems, data platform, and integrations. You set technical direction, own high‑stakes problems, and drive architectural standards that scale with regulatory requirements.

You will mentor engineers, push AI-enabled workflows, and lead vendor choices while ensuring reliability and audit readiness across the bank's surface areas. This is a rare, ownership‑driven role.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of software engineering experience with staff-level, hands-on builder credentials.
• Comfortable owning ambiguity at the largest scale, making tough prioritization calls.
• Hungry to leverage AI to drive outcomes with AI-assisted development tools.
• Bias toward simplicity and a lean engineering culture.
• Track record of setting technical direction across systems and teams.
• Deep systems thinking across public cloud infrastructure (AWS preferred).
• Regulated-environment experience involving examiner-facing documentation.
• Direct experience selecting and operating third-party platforms after launch.
• Comfortable communicating technical concepts to executives and non‑engineering audiences.
• Exceptional written and verbal communication.

Responsibilities

• Set technical direction across the bank's systems and cloud surfaces.
• Own the hardest problems end-to-end and define clear failure domains and runbooks.
• Be the force multiplier on a small team with code and design reviews.
• Ship AI-first solutions and push AI leverage in engineering workflows.
• Lead vendor selection, integration, and ongoing oversight of core platforms.
• Define integration boundaries between the bank and affirm inc.
• Build for examiners with compliance and audit considerations.
• Own reliability, observability, alerting, and disaster recovery practices.
• Influence executives, board members, and engineers across the organization.
• Mentor peers and help grow the team and engineering bar.

Skills

Software engineering

System ownership

AI tooling

Cloud infrastructure

AWS

Tools

Terraform

Snowflake

AWS

Job description

Affirm is hiring a Staff Software Engineer to anchor a small, AI-native team building the bank's core systems, data platform, and integrations. You set technical direction, own high‑stakes problems, and drive architectural standards that scale with regulatory requirements.

You will mentor engineers, push AI-enabled workflows, and lead vendor choices while ensuring reliability and audit readiness across the bank's surface areas. This is a rare, ownership‑driven role.