Staff Software Engineer (Infrastructure Platform)

Affirm; United States; Remote; GBP 140,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

An established industry player is looking for a Staff Software Engineer to enhance their Infrastructure Platform Engineering team. This role is essential for ensuring the reliability and operational efficiency of distributed systems in a fast-paced, cloud-native environment. You will be at the forefront of proactive failure mitigation, automation, and incident response strategies, fostering a culture of quality and ownership within your team. If you are passionate about driving technical excellence and thrive in collaborative settings, this position offers a unique opportunity to make a significant impact while working remotely.

Benefits

100% subsidized medical coverage

Dental and vision coverage

Flexible Spending Wallets

Competitive vacation and holiday schedules

Employee stock purchase plan

Qualifications

• 8+ years of experience in software engineering with a focus on backend systems.
• Proficient in cloud-native environments and operational efficiency.

Responsibilities

• Set technical strategy and collaborate across teams for project success.
• Ensure high availability and resilience of critical services.

Skills

Python

Kotlin

AWS

MySQL

Kubernetes

React

Vue

Incident Response

Automation

System Resilience

Education

Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or related field

Tools

CI/CD

Observability Tools

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.

We are seeking a Staff Software Engineer to join our Infrastructure Platform Engineering team, ensuring the reliability, availability, and operational efficiency of Affirm’s distributed systems. This role is ideal for engineers who thrive in highly scalable, cloud-native environments, focusing on incident response, observability, automation, and system resilience.

As part of the Platform, Reliability and Infrastructure Operations group, you will work on proactive failure mitigation, operational tooling, service scaling strategies, and on-call effectiveness to ensure low-latency, highly available services across Affirm's compute, storage, CI/CD, and observability stacks.

Affirm is scaling fast, and this role will help ensure our platform’s resilience as we keep operating across multiple regions!

What You'll Do:

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. You will act as a force-multiplier for your team through your definition and advocacy of technical solutions and operational processes.
4. 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.
5. 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.
6. You will help develop talent on your team by providing feedback and guidance, and leading by example.

What We Look For:

1. You have a total of 8+ years of experience as a software engineer.
2. You are proficient in designing, developing and launching backend systems at scale technologies like Python, Kotlin, AWS, MySQL, and Kubernetes.
3. You are proficient in developing web apps using declarative UI frameworks like React or Vue.
4. Ensure high availability (HA) and resilience of critical services through runbooks, incident response strategies, and post-mortem analysis.
5. Partner with Observability and Reliability teams to proactively detect and mitigate potential outages.
6. You have experience defining a technical plan for the delivery of a significant feature or system component with an elegant, simple and extensible design.
7. You write high quality code that is easily understood and used by others.
8. Automate operational tasks, deployments, failover processes, and scaling strategies to reduce manual intervention.
9. You are proficient at making significant changes in a large code base, and have developed a suite of tools and practices that enable you and your team to do so safely.
10. Partner closely with Storage & Replication, Cloud, CI/CD, and Security teams to ensure Affirm’s infrastructure meets high operational standards.
11. Your experience demonstrates that you take ownership of your growth, proactively seeking feedback from your team, your manager, and your stakeholders.
12. You have experience delivering major features, system components or deprecating existing functionality in a system through the definition of a technical and execution plan.
13. 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.
14. Your growth and impact trajectory demonstrates that you have mastered gathering and iterating on feedback from your engineering and cross-functional peers.
15. You have strong verbal and written communication skills that support effective collaboration with our global engineering team.

Compensation & Benefits

Base Pay Grade - P

Equity Grade - UK 7

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 monthly stipends for health, wellness and tech spending, and benefits (including 100% subsidized medical coverage, dental and vision for you and your dependents). In addition, the employees may be eligible for equity rewards offered by Affirm Holdings, Inc. (parent company).

GBR base pay range per year:£140,000 - 180,000

Location -Remote UK

#LI-Remote

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.

We’re extremely proud to offer competitive benefits that are anchored to our core value of people come first. Some key highlights of our benefits package include:

• 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.

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