Staff Software Engineer, Backend (Trust and Safety)

Affirm

7d • $204,000 - $290,000 • Remote

About The Position

The Trust and Safety Foundations team within Checkout Engineering builds and operates foundational systems and data capabilities that support how Affirm understands consumer risk and meets its credit reporting obligations. Our work sits at the intersection of data quality, system reliability, regulatory requirements, and risk, creating critical infrastructure that Affirm and its partners depend on to operate accurately and at scale.
As a Staff Software Engineer on Trust and Safety Foundations, you will help shape the team’s technical strategy and lead complex, business-critical initiatives across systems and stakeholders. You’ll turn ambiguous problems into clear technical approaches, guide projects from strategy through execution, and strengthen the reliability and sustainability of the systems we own. You’ll also act as a force multiplier by raising the bar for system design and engineering quality, sharing your expertise, and helping other engineers grow. This role requires strong technical judgment, deep ownership, and the ability to navigate complexity in a high-impact domain.

Requirements

• 8+ 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.
• Experience delivering major features, system components or deprecating existing functionality in a system through the definition of a technical and execution plan.
• Write high quality code that is easily understood and used by others.
• Thrive in ambiguity, and are comfortable moving from low level language idioms all the way to the architecture of large systems to understand how they work.
• Growth and impact trajectory demonstrates that you have mastered gathering and iterating on feedback from your engineering and cross-functional peers.
• Strong verbal and written communication skills that support effective collaboration with our global engineering team.
• Equivalent practical experience or a Bachelor’s degree in a related field.

Responsibilities

• Setting technical strategy for your team on a year-long time scale, and help your team tie it together with critical, business-impacting projects.
• Collaborating across teams in the product development lifecycle by collaborating with product management, design & analytics to ensure technical sustainability, risks and trade-offs are well understood and managed.
• Acting as a force-multiplier for your team through your definition and advocacy of technical solutions and operational processes.
• Taking ownership of your team’s operations and availability by ensuring you have the right monitoring, triage rotations, playbooks, policies, testing and alerting in place to support “keep the lights on” & on-call efforts.
• Fostering a culture of quality and ownership on your team by setting code review and design standards for your team, and advocating for them beyond your team through your writing and tech talks.
• Helping develop talent on your team by providing feedback and guidance, and leading by example.

Benefits

• Equity rewards
• Monthly stipends for health, wellness and tech spending
• 100% subsidized medical coverage
• Dental and vision for you and your dependents
• Health coverage at no cost: We cover 100% of premiums for employees and their dependents.
• Spending stipends: Monthly stipends support your tech setup, and the ability to choose health and wellness options that are right for you.
• Time off to recharge: Flexible time off and generous holiday calendars help you rest when you need to.
• Own a piece of what you build: Our employee stock purchase plan (ESPP) lets you buy Affirm stock at a discount.

What This Job Offers

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