Staff Software Engineer - SRE, Backend (Reliability Engineering)

Position Overview

• Location Type: Remote
• Employment Type: Full-time
• Salary: Not specified (Refer to Affirm's pay structure for details)
• Base Pay Grade: P
• Equity Grade: 13

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. Site Reliability Engineering at Affirm is a small, yet crucial, team that helps our Engineering partners to “Operate What They Own” with excellence to protect their customers’ experience. SRE accomplishes this through defining frameworks and best practices for operating applications, building tooling, and providing training and consulting.

Requirements

• 7+ years of experience designing, developing, and launching backend systems at scale using languages like Python or Kotlin.
• Extensive track record of developing highly available distributed systems using technologies like AWS, MySQL, Spark, and Kubernetes.
• 7+ years experience in a Site Reliability or Production Engineering team.
• Demonstrates curiosity with empathy, and strong opinions loosely held.
• Experience delivering major features, system components, or deprecating existing functionality in a system through the definition of a technical and execution plan.
• Writes high-quality code that is easily understood and used by others.
• Strong verbal and written communication skills for effective collaboration with a global engineering team.
• Either equivalent practical experience or a Bachelor’s degree in a related field.

Responsibilities

• Providing data and visibility to teams and leadership on application performance.
• Guiding the development of SLOs (Service Level Objectives).
• Driving the Incident Management and Analysis process.
• Steering the implementation of Change Management and Deployment practices.
• Engaging in service and architectural conversations.
• Recommending observability and alerting configurations.
• Setting technical strategy for the team on a year-long time scale.
• Collaborating across teams in the product development lifecycle with product management, design, and analytics to ensure technical sustainability, risks, and trade-offs are well understood and managed.
• Acting as a force-multiplier for the team through definition and advocacy of technical solutions and operational processes.
• Taking ownership of the team’s operations and availability by ensuring the right monitoring, triage rotations, playbooks, policies, testing, and alerting are in place to support “keep the lights on” & on-call efforts.
• Fostering a culture of quality and ownership on the team by setting code review and design standards, and advocating for them beyond the team through writing and tech talks.
• Helping develop talent on the team by providing feedback and guidance, and leading by example.

Company Information

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.