Staff Software Engineer, Backend (Compute)

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's engineering team is building a large-scale, fault-tolerant, and global infrastructure that is shared across multiple financial products. Ensuring that our infrastructure is available to all engineers is critical to the success of the business. We pride ourselves on our culture across engineering of writing blameless postmortems, writing detailed tech specs, and gathering feedback before large changes to systems.
The Compute team provides a Kubernetes-based platform that runs all of Affirm - enabling management, configuration, provisioning and operation of our compute infrastructure. Our customers are not only Affirm users, but also other engineering teams at Affirm. As a team, we develop and expose simple, self-serve interfaces that every Affirm engineer uses daily. We are building the ability to seamlessly enable high availability, region failover and reliability for both online and offline workloads - along with the powerful orchestration of deploying to our global fleet of compute nodes while dynamically scaling up and down to handle our traffic patterns with minimal cost.
What you'll do

• Lead and drive technical decisions, projects, and execution within the team.
• Collaborate with technical leads, and management across the platform, engineering, and product engineering organizations.
• Play a meaningful role in defining and helping to implement our platform taking into account the important principles of Fault-Tolerance, Isolation, Operability, Availability, Resilience (including full region failover).
• Design and build frameworks, services, and tools to handle new Affirm products and business requirements that securely scale over millions of users and their transactions.
• Challenge, educate, mentor and grow junior and senior engineers in the team

What we look for

• Hands on coding and debugging experience using modern software delivery methods to develop services using Python, Go, or JVM-based languages (Java, Kotlin, Scala)
• Experience with Amazon Web Services (AWS), EKS, EC2 and/or other cloud providers as well as experience with Terraform and Infrastructure as code
• Familiarity with Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) is a plus. We use technologies such as Kubernetes, ArgoCD, Docker, gRPC, Envoy, Istio, Celery/RabbitMQ, and NGINX but we are always looking for new technologies to adopt.
• Hands-on experience building platforms at scale for containerized workloads, particularly Kubernetes, including cluster provisioning, operations, and workflow orchestration.
• Experience with developing components within Kubernetes (eg: controllers) is a plus.
• You value keeping costs low while building your products.
• An eye for designing easy-to-use, customer-focused systems that other engineers will use to manage their infrastructure
• You prefer using, enhancing, and contributing to Open Source solutions rather than building solutions from ground up.
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, related technical field of study, or equivalent practical experience.

Location - Remote U.S.
Grade - USA31
#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 21-54: shorturl.at/H0124
Jobs in Grades 61-74: shorturl.at/kK015
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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