Senior Staff Software Engineer, Backend (Compute Platform)

Affirm

2h • $236,000 - $325,000 • Remote

About The Position

Affirm’s Compute Platform team owns the EKS foundation used by Affirm products, including cluster provisioning and lifecycle and safety standards that support reliable workloads at scale. The team operates more than 90 EKS clusters across environments and regions and works to make the fleet standardized, automated, observable, and self-healing. Its mission is to provide a secure, reliable, and scalable Kubernetes platform that lets infrastructure and application teams deploy and operate with confidence and minimal operational friction.

As a member of the Compute Platform organization, you will collaborate with Product, Infrastructure, Traffic, Cost & Capacity Engineering, and other teams. You will architect and evolve the EKS platform, lead the technical direction for cluster lifecycle workflows, own shared components and their delivery pipeline, establish workload safety standards and their enforcement, and advance observability, cost, and capacity practices. You will partner with teams that use the clusters, mentor engineers, and participate in the on-call rotation and production incident response.

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 office work. All new hires are invited to attend an in-person onboarding experience. The position requires either equivalent practical experience or a bachelor’s degree in a related field.

Requirements

• 10+ years in software or infrastructure engineering with proven delivery of complex platform solutions.
• 6+ years of hands-on experience operating production Kubernetes at scale, ideally EKS on AWS.
• Deep EKS and Kubernetes internals expertise, including cluster upgrades, node lifecycle, scheduling, and autoscaling such as Karpenter or Cluster Autoscaler.
• Demonstrated experience automating Kubernetes operations at fleet scale, including provisioning, upgrades, node lifecycle, self-healing remediation, and policy-driven enforcement through auditable self-service workflows.
• Strong grasp of workload reliability patterns, including resource tuning, probes, PDBs, topology, and isolation constraints.
• Experience designing and enforcing platform standards through policy, such as admission control, OPA/Gatekeeper, or equivalent, and automated frameworks.
• Infrastructure-as-Code fluency with Terraform and a GitOps- or pipeline-driven delivery model.
• Strong cloud-native architecture experience on AWS, including EC2, VPC, IAM, and EKS.
• Expert-level proficiency in Go or Python and a proven track record building production-grade Kubernetes controllers, operators, and platform tooling used by other engineering teams.
• Observability experience defining SLOs, building metrics, logs, and alerting coverage, and conducting data-driven baseline audits.
• Cross-functional collaboration skills with platform, product, SRE, and capacity teams.
• Demonstrated mentorship, technical leadership, and cross-functional influence.
• Track record designing and enforcing standards across many teams without becoming a bottleneck.
• Exceptional problem-solving and systems-thinking skills.
• Drive to track emerging Kubernetes community best practices and adapt them to Affirm’s needs.
• Either equivalent practical experience or a bachelor’s degree in a related field.

Nice To Haves

• Experience with Spacelift.
• Experience with GitOps-style deployment tools such as ArgoCD or kube-applier.
• Experience operating EKS on AWS.

Responsibilities

• Architect and evolve Affirm’s EKS platform, driving strategy for cluster lifecycle, node management, and shared cluster components.
• Lead the technical direction for cluster provisioning, upgrades, and teardown through standardized IaC using Terraform and Spacelift and self-service workflows.
• Own the reliability of core shared fleet components, including Karpenter, CoreDNS, VPC CNI, Kube Proxy, and Metrics Server, as well as the CI/CD pipeline that ships them consistently.
• Define and enforce EKS workload safety standards covering resource configuration, workload isolation and blast radius, disruption tolerance such as PDBs, and Karpenter consolidation strategies.
• Build enforcement and automation pathways that move standards from research and white-glove onboarding to broad adoption and policy-enforced defaults for new workloads.
• Establish observability, baseline audits, and reporting to identify hot spots and measure risk mitigation over time.
• Partner with cluster-user teams, including checkout, batch, ML, analytics, and DevProd, to understand workload needs and shape the platform.
• Drive cost and capacity strategy across node scaling, bin packing, and EC2 instance selection.
• Mentor engineers across the Compute Platform teams and set the bar for operational excellence.
• Participate in the on-call rotation, triage and catalogue runtime Kubernetes issues, and collaborate with SRE on production incidents.

Benefits

• 100% subsidized medical coverage, including coverage for employees and their dependents.
• Dental and vision coverage for employees and their dependents.
• Monthly stipends for tech setup, health, and wellness spending.
• Flexible time off and generous holiday calendars.
• Employee stock purchase plan (ESPP) allowing employees to buy Affirm stock at a discount.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior