Principal Software Engineer, Backend (International)

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. Affirm proudly includes Returnly.
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. Affirm's vision is to deliver honest financial products that improve lives. In the US now, Affirm now covers half of all ecommerce volume and has access to nearly all buyers . Our mission, as part of the International Engineering team, is to replicate the success Affirm has had in the US globally. International is projected to be a major growth driver for Affirm in the very near future and our charter is to make that a reality.
In this role as a Principal Software Engineer, you will be responsible for providing technical leadership across all of Affirm's engineering teams to scale and internationalize Affirm's systems. You will be developing, best in industry, distributed systems architecture, frameworks and platforms that enable Affirm to quickly launch and scale Affirm's tech stack to global markets. The ideal candidate will be passionate about fostering a culture of engineering excellence and innovation, unafraid to roll up their sleeves with engineers with a proven track record of delivering results.
Key Responsibilities

• Drafts and guides technical proposals across several cross-functional teams to globalize and scale systems
• Identifies opportunities across Affirm's tech stack for International, creates detailed documentation and proposal, works with cross functional teams and consolidates that as a formal Roadmap
• Serves as an architect expert, guiding and reviewing the design proposals across International Engineering
• Collaborates with Engineering Managers and Senior management, and enables Staff Engineers to engage on aspects of larger initiatives
• Supports engineers and develops frameworks and tools for detailed project definition, design, cross-functional alignment, estimation, task break-down, and delivery.
• Guides conversations to remove blockers and encourage collaboration across teams

• Conducts technical and soft skill evaluations to inform and influence the hiring decisions of engineers and managers
• Coach, mentor, grow, and provide advice to other domain experts, individual contributors, across several teams in the organization

• Serve as a point of escalation for teams facing complex technical challenges. Exposes technology and organizational needs throughout their department.
• Looks for innovation opportunities between several teams with a willingness to experiment and to boldly confront problems of large complexity and scope
• Proposes and implements technical solutions which support architectural changes that solve scaling and performance problems.
• Knowledgeable in all specialities practiced within the teams
• Interact with customers and other external stakeholders as a consultant and spokesperson for the work of your organization. Exposes the work of the teams and their business impact internally.

Required skills

• Demonstrated experience in architecting, building and scaling platforms and distributed systems that require high availability and resilience
• Experience with building services in Python/Kotlin/Golang is required
• Experience with AWS or related cloud technologies is required
• Experience working with different types of databases - both SQL and no-SQL is required
• Experience working with modern frontend frameworks (eg. React/Vue.js/Angular) is required
• Experience with developing and maintaining external facing APIs and developer portals is a good to have
• Experience working with Internationalization initiatives is a good to have
• Experience in open source contributions and adopting cloud native cloud foundations projects is preferred
• Experience with Fintech, Retail industries for both B2C and B2B (merchants/affiliates) marketing and personalization capabilities is desirable.

Location - Remote U.S.
Grade - 33
#LI-Remote
Affirm is proud to be a remote-first company ! The majority of our roles are remote and can be located anywhere in the U.S. and Canada (with the exception of the U.S. Territories, Quebec, Yukon, Nunavut, and the Northwest Territories) unless the job indicates a different global location. We are currently building operations in Spain, Poland, and Australia. Employees in remote roles have the option of working remotely or from an Affirm office in their country of hire, and may occasionally travel to an Affirm office or elsewhere for required meetings or team-building events. Our offices in Chicago, New York, Pittsburgh, Salt Lake City, San Francisco and Toronto will remain operational and accessible for anyone to use on a voluntary basis, subject to local COVID-19 guidelines.
[For U.S. Candidates] All full-time jobs at Affirm (excluding interns and apprentices) are tied to a transparent grade-based pay range taking location into account. The grade for this position is noted above and in accordance with various U.S. pay transparency laws, we provide the base pay range and benefits for our U.S.-based positions in the links below:
Jobs in Grades 21 through 54
Jobs in Grades 61 through 74
If you got this far, we hope you're feeling excited about this role. Even if you don't feel you meet every single requirement, we still encourage you to apply. We're eager to meet people who believe in Affirm's mission and can contribute to our team in a variety of ways-not just candidates who check all the boxes.
Inclusivity:
At Affirm, People Come First is one of our core values, and that's why diversity and inclusion are vital to our priorities as an equal opportunity employer. You can read about our D&I program here and our progress thus far in our 2021 DEI Report .
We also 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.
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