Manager, Software Engineering (Resilience Engineering)
About The Position
Affirm is seeking a seasoned Engineering Manager to lead its Resilience Engineering team. The role is focused on protecting production system safety and reliability through proactive validation, especially production load testing and chaos engineering. The manager will develop systems and practices that let engineers safely test system behavior under stress and failure conditions in production, so issues can be found and mitigated before affecting users. The role sets the vision for resilience engineering, leads and mentors engineers building platforms and tooling for safe production experimentation, and partners with infrastructure, product, and security leadership to integrate resilience validation into the software development lifecycle. It owns platforms for controlled load testing and fault injection, including safeguards such as isolation boundaries, approval workflows, and automated rollback. It also drives observability, traceability, auditability, monitoring, alerting, incident response, reliability improvements, and adoption of shared resilience practices across engineering teams. Affirm is a remote-first company. Most roles can be performed from almost anywhere within the country of employment, though some positions may occasionally require in-person work at an Affirm office. New hires are invited to attend an in-person onboarding experience.
Requirements
- Proven experience leading engineering teams in reliability, infrastructure, or distributed systems.
- Hands-on experience with production load testing, chaos engineering, or large-scale system validation.
- Experience leveraging a chaos engineering vendor such as Gremlin, Harness, or a similar tool.
- Strong understanding of distributed-system failure modes, including latency, partial failure, and cascading outages.
- Experience building or operating systems with strong safety guarantees, including isolation, rate limiting, guardrails, and auditability.
- Familiarity with cloud-native environments such as AWS and Kubernetes, and with observability tooling.
- Strong programming background in Python, Kotlin, Java, or a similar language.
- Excellent problem-solving skills and ability to balance long-term resilience investments with immediate business needs.
- Strong communication and leadership skills, with a track record of influencing engineering practices across teams.
- Equivalent practical experience or a bachelor's degree in a related field.
Responsibilities
- Define and drive the vision for resilience engineering, emphasizing production load testing and chaos engineering as first-class engineering practices.
- Lead and mentor a team building platforms and tooling for safe production experimentation.
- Partner with infrastructure, product, and security leadership to embed resilience validation into the software development lifecycle.
- Establish best practices for safely testing system limits and failure scenarios in production.
- Own the design and evolution of platforms for safe, controlled production load testing and fault injection.
- Ensure safeguards such as isolation boundaries, approval workflows, and automated rollback mechanisms protect real users.
- Build systems that provide end-to-end observability, traceability, and auditability for resilience experiments.
- Identify weaknesses through load testing and chaos experiments and drive reliability improvements.
- Establish monitoring, alerting, and incident response practices tailored to proactive resilience validation.
- Work with engineering teams to design and safely execute production load tests and chaos experiments.
- Partner with infrastructure teams to build guardrails around tests and experimentation.
- Enable teams to adopt resilience practices with reusable tooling, frameworks, and standardized workflows.
- Identify systemic weaknesses and lead cross-functional efforts to improve reliability and fault tolerance.
- Promote a culture of testing failure before failure affects the organization.
Benefits
- 100% subsidized medical coverage for employees and dependents.
- Dental and vision coverage for employees and dependents.
- Monthly stipends for technology setup and health and wellness spending.
- Flexible time off and generous holiday calendars.
- Employee stock purchase plan allowing employees to buy Affirm stock at a discount.
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Manager
