Staff Software Engineer (Backend, Identity Decisioning)

Affirm; New York (NY); Remote; USD 170,000 - 250,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Remote-first compensation

Spending wallets

Employee resource groups

Remote-first Workforce

Generous time off

Health benefits

Mental healthcare

Parental leave

Away days

Learning & development

Job summary

Affirm is seeking an experienced engineering leader to set the technical strategy for a high-impact backend team. You will drive collaboration with product, design, and analytics to ensure sustainable solutions and clear risk trade-offs, while owning on-call readiness and operational excellence.

You will establish coding and design standards, promote high-quality delivery, and mentor engineers to grow with the team.

Qualifications

• 8+ years designing, developing and launching backend systems at scale (Python or Kotlin).
• Ability to gather and iterate on feedback from engineering and cross-functional peers.
• Comfort with ambiguity and scaling from low-level idioms to large system architecture.

Responsibilities

• Set technical strategy for your team on a year-long horizon and tie it to business-impacting projects.
• Collaborate across product management, design and analytics for sustainability, risk and trade-off decisions.
• Define and advocate technical solutions and operational processes.
• Own your team’s operations and availability with monitoring, triage rotations, playbooks, policies, testing and on-call readiness.
• Foster a culture of quality and ownership by setting design and code-review standards and sharing them across teams.
• Develop talent by mentoring and guiding team members and leading by example.

Skills

Backend design

Distributed systems

Python

Kotlin

AWS

MySQL

Spark

Kubernetes

Technical leadership

Communication

Education

Bachelor's degree or equivalent experience

Tools

AWS

MySQL

Spark

Kubernetes

Job description

• 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, polcities, 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

Benefits

• Compensation: We have a simple, flexible, and transparent remote-first compensation structure so you can make the best decisions for yourself and your family
• Spending Wallets: Access tech, food, lifestyle, and family planning wallets for your expenses
• Supportive Communities: Get involved with our employee resource groups and community groups
• Remote-first Workforce: If your role is remote, you can set up shop anywhere in your home country
• Generous Time Off: Take the time you need when life happens
• Health Benefits: Get a plan that fits your needs
• Mental Healthcare: Take care of your mind with great mental health programs
• Parental Leave: Birth and non-birth parents get 18 weeks’ paid leave. Plus, a 4-week return-to-work transition program, at full base pay
• Away Days: We offer 20 company-wide paid days off—which help our teams collectively pause to recharge
• Learning & Development: Engage in exciting learning programs to level up your growth

You have 8+ years of experience designing, developing and launching backend systems at scale using languages like Python or KotlinYour growth and impact trajectory demonstrates that you have mastered gathering and iterating on feedback from your engineering and cross-functional peersYou 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 workYou have strong verbal and written communication skills that support effective collaboration with our global engineering teamYou 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 othersYou have an extensive track record of developing highly available distributed systems using technologies like AWS, MySQL, Spark and KubernetesThis position requires either equivalent practical experience or a Bachelor’s degree in a related field