Software Engineer, Developer Productivity

Company: Affirm

Position Overview: Affirm is revolutionizing credit to offer a more honest and friendly experience, empowering consumers to buy now and pay later with transparency and no hidden fees. The Developer Productivity team is dedicated to enhancing the work experience for every engineer at Affirm, aiming to simplify and accelerate software development company-wide. This team manages the entire developer workflow, from their local machines to production, encompassing ephemeral development environments, CI/CD pipelines, test automation frameworks, dependency management, and release engineering. The tools and platforms developed by this team enable engineers to deploy code rapidly, securely, and with confidence. This role supports over 900 engineers working across a diverse technology stack in a fast-paced Fintech environment, presenting a complex and high-impact challenge at scale.

Responsibilities:

• Technical Strategy: Set technical strategy for the team on a year-long horizon and guide the team in executing critical, business-impacting projects.
• Cross-Team Collaboration: Partner with product management, design, and analytics throughout the product development lifecycle to ensure technical sustainability and manage risks and trade-offs.
• Force Multiplication: Act as a force multiplier for the team by defining and championing technical solutions and operational processes.
• Operational Excellence: Own team operations and availability by establishing robust monitoring, triage rotations, playbooks, policies, testing, and alerting for "keep the lights on" and on-call efforts.
• Foster Quality & Ownership: Cultivate a culture of quality and ownership within the team through high-quality code reviews, setting design standards, and advocating for these practices beyond the team via writing and tech talks. Enhance collaboration through practices like pair programming and knowledge sharing.
• Talent Development: Contribute to the growth of team members by providing feedback, guidance, and leading by example.

Requirements:

• 8+ years of experience in designing, developing, and launching backend or infrastructure systems at scale using languages such as Python or Kotlin.
• Demonstrated growth and impact trajectory showcasing mastery in proactively gathering and iterating on feedback from engineering and cross-functional peers.
• Extensive track record of supporting highly available distributed systems using technologies like AWS (or GCP, Azure), distributed databases, containerization, and Kubernetes.
• Active experience building scalable infrastructure components, including pipelines (Jenkins, Buildkite, GitHub Actions), configuration management, and automation.
• Proven experience in delivering major features, system components, or deprecating existing functionality through well-defined technical and execution plans.
• Ability to write high-quality, easily understood, and reusable code.
• Comfort working in ambiguous environments, with the ability to deeply understand system mechanics from language idioms to large-scale architecture.
• Strong verbal and written communication skills for effective collaboration with a global and remote engineering team.
• Keeps informed and up-to-date on tools, technologies, and best practices within one or more language ecosystems.
• Experience creating and maintaining automated workflows for building, testing, and deploying code, including issue identification, resolution, and performance optimization.
• Requires equivalent practical experience or a Bachelor’s degree in a related field.

Compensation:

• Base Pay Grade: P
• Equity Grade: 13

Note: Employees new to Affirm typically start at the beginning of the pay range. Affirm maintains a simple and transparent pay structure influenced by factors such as location, experience, and job-related skills. Base pay is part of a comprehensive total compensation package that may include equity rewards and monthly stipends.