Staff Software Engineer, Backend (Order Platform)

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

Benefits offered by this job

Health coverage for you and dependents

Flexible Spending Wallets

Time off and holidays

Employee stock purchase plan

Job summary

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. As a Staff Software Engineer on the Order Platform team, you will shape the systems powering affirm purchases after checkout, including orders, captures, refunds, and settlement, while driving the technical strategy at scale.

You will mentor engineers, own decisions, and help unify internal platforms for post-checkout APIs

Qualifications

• 8+ years of experience designing, developing and launching backend systems at scale.
• Experience with AWS, MySQL, Spark, and Kubernetes for distributed services.
• Design services with clear API boundaries, reliability, and proper error handling.
• Track record delivering major features or refactoring in payments, commerce domains.
• Strong communication and ability to work across teams.
• Bachelor’s degree or equivalent practical experience.

Responsibilities

• Set technical strategy for your team on a year-long horizon and align with business goals.
• Collaborate with product management, design, and analytics to balance risks and trade-offs.
• Define and advocate scalable technical solutions and operational processes.
• Own team operations, availability, monitoring, runbooks, testing, and on-call readiness.
• Establish code quality standards and promote them beyond your team.
• Mentor engineers and develop talent through feedback and example.

Skills

Python

Kotlin

Backend design

Distributed systems

System thinking

Code quality

Cross-team collaboration

Communication

Education

Bachelor’s degree or equivalent experience

Tools

AWS

MySQL

Spark

Kubernetes

Job description

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.

As a Staff Software Engineer on the Order Platform team, you'll shape the systems that power every affirm purchase after checkout - orders, captures, refunds, and settlement - and drive the technical strategy that lets our merchants and consumers transact reliably at scale. Your work raises the bar for reliability and simplicity across our engineering systems, keeping the platform highly available while defining the capabilities that unlock future product needs.

We’re a small, senior team doing high-leverage work within Financial Platforms. Today we’re consolidating the internal platform behind affirm’s post-checkout APIs - drawing clean domain boundaries, migrating existing merchants, and enabling future product launches. You’ll set technical direction, mentor a strong group of engineers, and own decisions that matter for years.

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, 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.

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 are analytical and discerning in designing services with clear API boundaries, strong reliability characteristics, and thoughtful handling of consistency, idempotency, and failure modes - ideally in a payments, commerce, ledger, or other financially-sensitive domain.
• 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 our global engineering team.
• This position requires either equivalent practical experience or a Bachelor’s degree in a related field.

Base Pay Grade

Base Pay Grade - P

Equity Grade - USA 13

Equity Grade - USA 13

Employees new to affirm typically come in at the start of the pay range. affirm focuses on providing a simple and transparent pay structure which is based on a variety of factors, including location, experience and job-related skills.

Base pay is part of a total compensation package that may include equity rewards, monthly stipends for health, wellness and tech spending, and benefits (including 100% subsidized medical coverage, dental and vision for you and your dependents.)

USA base pay range (CA, WA, NY, NJ, CT) per year: $230,000 - $290,000

USA base pay range (all other U.S. states) per year: $204,000 - $264,000

Affirm is proud to be a remote-first company! The majority of our roles are remote and you can work almost anywhere within the country of employment. affirmers in proximal roles have the flexibility to work remotely, but will occasionally be required to work out of their assigned affirm office. A limited number of roles remain office-based due to the nature of their job responsibilities.

Benefits

• Health care coverage - affirm covers all premiums for all levels of coverage for you and your dependents
• Flexible Spending Wallets - generous stipends for spending on Technology, Food, various Lifestyle needs, and family forming expenses
• Time off - competitive vacation and holiday schedules allowing you to take time off to rest and recharge
• ESPP - An employee stock purchase plan enabling you to buy shares of affirm at a discount

We believe It’s On Us to provide an inclusive interview experience for all, including people with disabilities. We are happy to provide reasonable accommodations to candidates in need of individualized support during the hiring process.

[For U.S. positions that could be performed in Los Angeles or San Francisco] Pursuant to the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance and Los Angeles Fair Chance Initiative for Hiring Ordinance, affirm will consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records.