Staff Software Engineer, Backend (Order Platform)

Affirm

1d•$204,000 - $290,000•Remote

About The Position

As a Staff Software Engineer on the Order Platform team, you'll shape the systems that power every Affirm purchase after checkout — orders, captures, refunds, and settlement — and drive the technical strategy that lets our merchants and consumers transact reliably at scale. Your work raises the bar for reliability and simplicity across our engineering systems, keeping the platform highly available while defining the capabilities that unlock future product needs. We're a small, senior team doing high-leverage work within Financial Platforms. Today we're consolidating the internal platform behind Affirm's post-checkout APIs — drawing clean domain boundaries, migrating existing merchants, and enabling future product launches. You'll set technical direction, mentor a strong group of engineers, and own decisions that matter for years.

Requirements

8+ years of experience designing, developing and launching backend systems at scale using languages like Python or Kotlin.
An extensive track record of developing highly available distributed systems using technologies like AWS, MySQL, Spark and Kubernetes.
Analytical and discerning in designing services with clear API boundaries, strong reliability characteristics, and thoughtful handling of consistency, idempotency, and failure modes — ideally in a payments, commerce, ledger, or other financially-sensitive domain.
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.
This position requires either 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, polcities, 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.