Staff Software Engineer, Backend (Order Platform)

Remote; San Francisco (CA); Remote; USD 204,000 - 290,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity rewards

Health coverage

Dental & vision

Monthly stipends for health/tech

Job summary

Affirm is reinventing credit to make it more honest and friendly, giving consumers the flexibility to buy now and pay later without hidden fees. As a Staff Software Engineer on the Order Platform team, you will shape systems powering orders, captures, refunds, and settlement, driving reliability at scale.

You will lead technical direction, mentor engineers, and own decisions with long-term impact across a payments-focused domain.

Qualifications

• 8+ years designing, developing and launching backend systems at scale.
• Experience with Python or Kotlin and highly available services.
• Strong API design with clear boundaries and reliability.
• Excellent collaboration with product, design and analytics.
• Bachelor's degree or equivalent in a related field.

Responsibilities

• Set technical strategy for your team on a year-long time scale.
• Collaborate across product, design and analytics to ensure sustainability and risk awareness.
• Define and advocate technical solutions and operational processes.
• Own your team's operations and availability with monitoring and on-call readiness.
• Set code review and design standards and mentor teammates.

Skills

Python/Kotlin

Distributed systems

AWS

MySQL

Spark

Kubernetes

APIs & boundaries

Communication

Education

Bachelor's degree or equivalent

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 - 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
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