Senior Software Engineer, Backend (Reliability Platform)

Affirm is reinventing credit to provide consumers with clear, predictable ways to pay over time without hidden fees or compounding interest. The Senior Software Engineer will design and build a next-generation reliability platform for production systems, combining distributed systems engineering with AI-assisted development. The role focuses on shipping reliable backend systems, improving service health and observability, and guiding engineering delivery and quality.

Responsibilities:

• You will be responsible for owning and delivering quarterly goals for your team, leading engineers on your team through ambiguity to solve open-ended problems, and ensuring that everyone is supported throughout delivery
• You will support your peers and stakeholders in the product development lifecycle by collaborating with product management, design & analytics by participating in ideation, articulating technical constraints, and partnering on decisions that properly consider risks and trade-offs
• You will proactively identify project, process, technology or business issues, advocate for them, and lead in solving them
• You will support the operations and availability of your team’s artifacts by creating and monitoring metrics, escalating when needed, and supporting “keep the lights on” & on-call efforts
• You will foster a culture of quality and ownership on your team by setting or improving code review and design standards for your team, and advocating for them beyond your team through your writing and tech talks
• You will help develop talent on your team by providing feedback and guidance, and leading by example

Requirements:

• You have a total of 4+ years of experience as a software engineer
• You are experienced in designing, developing and launching backend systems at scale technologies like Python, Kotlin, AWS, MySQL, and Kubernetes
• You have experience shipping web apps using declarative UI frameworks like React or Vue
• Practical use of LLMs or AI frameworks to enhance automation and guidance with guardrails and citations
• You have experience defining a technical plan for the delivery of a significant feature or system component with an elegant, simple and extensible design. You write high quality code that is easily understood and used by others
• You are proficient at making significant changes in a large code base, and have developed a suite of tools and practices that enable you and your team to do so safely
• Your experience demonstrates that you take ownership of your growth, proactively seeking feedback from your team, your manager, and your stakeholders
• You have 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