Senior Software Engineer - Infrastructure Platform Engineering

Company: Affirm

About Affirm: 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.

Position Overview: We are seeking a Senior Software Engineer to join our Infrastructure Platform Engineering team. This role is responsible for ensuring the reliability, availability, and operational efficiency of Affirm’s distributed systems. It 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:

• Ownership & Delivery: Own and deliver quarterly goals for your team, leading engineers through ambiguity to solve open-ended problems, and ensuring team support throughout delivery.
• Collaboration: Support peers and stakeholders in the product development lifecycle by collaborating with product management, design & analytics. Participate in ideation, articulate technical constraints, and partner on decisions considering risks and trade-offs.
• Proactive Problem Solving: Proactively identify project, process, technology, or business issues, advocate for them, and lead in solving them.
• Operational Support: Support the operations and availability of team artifacts by creating and monitoring metrics, escalating when needed, and supporting “keep the lights on” & on-call efforts.
• Culture of Quality: Foster a culture of quality and ownership by setting or improving code review and design standards for your team, and advocating for them beyond your team through writing and tech talks.
• Talent Development: Help develop talent on your team by providing feedback and guidance, and leading by example.
• On-Call Rotation: Participate in an on-call rotation as a requirement for this role.

What We Look For:

• Experience: 5+ years of experience as a software engineer.
• Backend Systems: Experience designing, developing, and launching backend systems at scale using technologies like Python, Kotlin, AWS, MySQL, and Kubernetes.
• Web Applications: Experience shipping web apps using declarative UI frameworks like React or Vue.
• High Availability (HA) & Resilience: Ensure HA and resilience of critical services through runbooks, incident response strategies, and post-mortem analysis.
• Proactive Detection: Partner with Observability and Reliability teams to proactively detect and mitigate potential outages.
• Technical Planning: Experience defining a technical plan for the delivery of a significant feature or system component with an elegant, simple, and extensible design. Write high-quality code that is easily understood and used by others.
• Automation: Automate operational tasks, deployments, failover processes, and scaling strategies to reduce manual intervention.
• Codebase Management: Proficiency in making significant changes in a large codebase, and developing tools and practices to do so safely.
• Cross-Team Collaboration: Partner closely with Storage & Replication, Cloud, CI/CD, and Security teams to ensure Affirm’s infrastructure meets high operational standards.
• Growth & Ownership: Demonstrate ownership of your growth, proactively seeking feedback from your team, manager, and stakeholders.
• Communication Skills: Strong verbal and written communication skills to support effective collaboration with our global engineering team.

Compensation & Benefits:

• Base Pay Grade: N
• Equity Grade: 4

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.