Staff Software Engineer, Backend (Order Platform)

Affirm; Salt Lake City (UT); On-site; USD 204,000 - 290,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health coverage for you and dependents

Equity / stock options

Stipends for health, wellness & tech

Job summary

Affirm is a remote-first fintech company reinventing credit to offer transparent, flexible pay-later options. As a Staff Software Engineer on the Order Platform, you’ll shape backend systems for orders, captures, refunds, and settlement, and drive technical direction for scale.

You’ll mentor engineers, own reliability and on-call readiness, and set coding standards across the team. You’ll collaborate with product, design, and analytics to deliver high-impact features while maintaining strong API

Qualifications

• 8+ years designing, developing and launching backend systems at scale.
• Experience with Python or Kotlin in production.
• Proven ability to build highly available distributed systems (AWS, MySQL, Spark, Kubernetes).
• Strong API design, reliability, idempotency, and error handling in payments/commerce domains.
• Bachelor’s degree or equivalent practical experience.

Responsibilities

• Set technical strategy for your team on a year-long time scale.
• Collaborate with product, design and analytics to ensure technical sustainability, risks and trade-offs are understood.
• Define and advocate effective technical solutions and operational processes.
• Own on-call readiness, monitoring, runbooks, incident response and reliability.
• Mentor engineers and foster a culture of quality and ownership.
• Develop talent through feedback and leading by example.

Skills

Backend design

Distributed systems

Python/Kotlin

AWS

Payments domain

Education

Bachelor’s degree or equivalent practical experience

Tools

MySQL

Spark

Kubernetes

AWS

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 - P

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.