Staff Software Engineer, Backend (Capacity Modeling)

Affirm; Stati Uniti; Remoto; USD 180.000 - 250.000; Tempo pieno

Descrizione del lavoro

Affirm is reinventing credit to make it more honest and friendly, offering buy now, pay later with no hidden fees or compounding interest. The Capacity Modeling team translates demand forecasts into capacity plans and recommends resource settings across regions and environments, including Compute and services like ElasticCache, DynamoDB, and AuroraDB.

You will lead technical strategy, collaborate across product, design and analytics, and own operations and reliability for scalable backend

Competenze

• 8+ years designing backend systems at scale.
• Experience with AWS, MySQL, Spark and Kubernetes.
• Experience delivering scale for large sales events like Prime Day / Black Friday.
• Strong code quality and architecture delivery.

Mansioni

• Set technical strategy for the team on a year-long horizon.
• Collaborate with product management, design & analytics on sustainability and risks.
• Act as a force-multiplier by defining technical solutions and processes.
• Own operations and availability with monitoring, triage, playbooks and on-call best practices.
• Set code review and design standards and advocate them beyond the team.
• Develop talent by mentoring and leading by example.

Conoscenze

Python

Kotlin

Backend design

Distributed systems

Formazione

Bachelor's degree in a related field

Strumenti

AWS

MySQL

Spark

Kubernetes

Descrizione del lavoro

Affirm is reinventing credit to make it more honest and friendly, giving consumers the flexibility to buy now and pay later without any hidden fees or compounding interest.

The Capacity Modeling team ensures affirm can safely handle forecasted traffic - especially during peak sales events - by translating demand forecasts into concrete, testable capacity plans. They build and maintain statistical capacity models that map traffic inputs (e.g., checkout volume, app opens, batch/job activity) to resource outputs (CPU, memory, connections) and then convert those forecasts into recommended capacity settings such as pod counts, HPA ranges, and/or infrastructure sizing changes across regions and environments.

The coverage of infrastructure resources includes not only Compute but also infrastructure such as ElasticCache, DynamoDB, AuroraDB, and more.

What You'll Do

• You will be responsible for setting technical strategy for your team on a year-long time scale, and help your team tie it together with critical, business-impacting projects.
• You will collaborate across teams in the product development lifecycle by collaborating with product management, design & analytics to ensure technical sustainability, risks and trade-offs are well understood and managed.
• You will act as a force-multiplier for your team through your definition and advocacy of technical solutions and operational processes.
• You take ownership of your team's operations and availability by ensuring you have the right monitoring, triage rotations, playbooks, policies, testing and alerting in place to support "keep the lights on" & on-call efforts.
• You will foster a culture of quality and ownership on your team by setting code review and design standards for your team, and advocating for them beyond your team through your writing and tech talks.
• You will help develop talent on your team by providing feedback and guidance, and leading by example.

What We Look For

• You have 8+ years of experience designing, developing and launching backend systems at scale using languages like Python or Kotlin.
• You have an extensive track record of developing highly available distributed systems using technologies like AWS, MySQL, Spark and Kubernetes.
• You have experience supporting scale up and down of large scale sales event such as Prime Day, Black Friday Cyber Monday, or other sales holidays
• You have tuned autoscaling, CPU/Memory, and multi-threading for compute type workloads.
• You have experience delivering major features, system components or deprecating existing functionality in a system through the definition of a technical and execution plan. You write high quality code that is easily understood and used by others.
• You thrive in ambiguity, and are comfortable moving from low level language idioms all the way to the architecture of large systems to understand how they work.
• Your growth and impact trajectory demonstrates that you have mastered gathering and iterating on feedback from your engineering and cross-functional peers.
• You have strong verbal and written communication skills that support effective collaboration with your global engineering team.
• This position requires either equivalent practical experience or a Bachelor's degree in a related field.