Staff Software Engineer, Backend (Growth Platform)

Affirm is reinventing credit to make it more honest and friendly, and they are seeking a Staff Software Engineer for their Growth Platform team. This role involves setting technical strategy, collaborating with various teams, and ensuring the robustness of backend platforms that influence customer acquisition and retention.

Responsibilities:

• You will be responsible for setting technical strategy for your team on a year-long time scale, owning backend platforms that power incentives and growth initiatives across Affirm
• You will collaborate with product management, analytics, and partner teams to shape technical direction for incentive systems, ensuring long-term sustainability, correctness, and clear trade-offs that inform roadmap decisions
• You will act as a force-multiplier by defining platform abstractions, APIs, and architectural patterns that enable product teams to safely launch, experiment with, and evolve incentive-based experiences
• You take ownership of your team’s operations and availability by ensuring robust monitoring, alerting, playbooks, and on-call practices are in place for business-critical incentive and growth systems
• You will foster a culture of quality and ownership by setting clear design and code review standards, and advocating for them beyond your immediate team through written proposals and technical discussions
• You will help develop talent on your team by providing actionable feedback, technical guidance, and leadership on complex, high-impact systems

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 such as AWS, MySQL, Spark, and Kubernetes
• Experience building or evolving shared backend platforms that support Rewards, Loyalty, Incentives, Experimentation, or other growth-critical workflows used by multiple product teams
• Led complex technical initiatives that required cross-team alignment, long-term architectural thinking, and influence without direct authority
• Experience delivering major features, system components, or deprecating existing functionality through the definition and execution of a clear technical plan
• Ability to write high quality code that is easily understood and used by others
• Thrive in ambiguity, and are comfortable moving from low-level language idioms to the architecture of large-scale systems to understand how they work end to end
• Growth and impact trajectory demonstrates mastery in gathering, incorporating, and iterating on feedback from engineering and cross-functional peers
• Strong verbal and written communication skills that support effective collaboration with a global engineering organization
• This position requires either equivalent practical experience or a Bachelor's degree in a related field