Software Engineer - SRE, Backend; Reliability Engineering

Staff Software Engineer – SRE, Backend (Reliability Engineering)

Affirm is reinventing credit to make it more honest and friendly, giving consumers the flexibility to buy now and pay later without any hidden fees or compounding interest.

Join to apply for the Staff Software Engineer – SRE, Backend (Reliability Engineering) role at Affirm
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• Defining frameworks and best practices for operating applications, building tooling, and providing training and consulting.
• Providing data and visibility to teams and leadership on application performance.
• Guiding the development of SLOs.
• Driving the Incident Management and Analysis process.
• Steering the implementation of Change Management and Deployment practices.
• Engaging in service and architectural conversations.
• Recommending observability and alerting configurations.

• Infrastructure, platform, and distributed systems.
• Capacity management, load and chaos testing.
• Automation, observability, and configuration management.
• Development and product experience.

• Set technical strategy vision for your team on a multi‑year time scale and tie it with business‑impacting projects.
• Collaborate across the product development lifecycle with infrastructure, product management, developer experience, and analytics to keep technical sustainability, risks and trade‑offs well understood.
• Act as a force‑multiplier through definition and advocacy of technical solutions and operational processes.
• Take ownership of team operations and availability by ensuring proper monitoring, triage rotations, playbooks, policies, testing, and alerting for “keep the lights on” & on‑call efforts.
• Foster a culture of quality and ownership with code review and design standards, advocating beyond your team through writing and tech talks.
• Help develop talent by providing feedback, guidance, and leading by example.

• 8+ years of experience designing, developing, and launching backend systems at scale using scripting and development languages like Bash, Python, or Kotlin.
• Extensive track record building highly available distributed systems using AWS, MySQL, Spark, and Kubernetes.
• Track record of managing, driving, and improving the Incident Lifecycle process from live incident management through retrospectives and post‑incident analysis.
• 7+ years experience in Site Reliability or Production Engineering teams.
• Demonstrated curiosity with empathy, and strong opinions loosely held.
• Experience delivering major features, system components, or deprecating existing functionality through a technical and execution plan; write high‑quality code.
• Thrives in ambiguity and comfortable moving from low‑level language idioms to large‑system architecture.
• Growth and impact trajectory shows mastery of feedback from peers.
• Strong verbal and written communication skills for effective collaboration with global engineering and stakeholders.
• Position requires equivalent practical experience or a Bachelor’s degree in a related field.

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Employees new to Affirm typically come in at the start of the pay range.
Affirm focuses on providing a simple and transparent pay structure based on location, experience, and job‑related skills. Base pay is part of a total compensation package that may include equity rewards, monthly stipends for health, wellness, and tech spending, and benefits (including 100% subsidized medical coverage, dental, and vision for you and your dependents). USA base pay ranges:
CA, WA, NY, NJ, CT per year: $225,000 – $275,000;
all other U.S. states per year: $200,000 – $250,000.

Remote – US

• Health care coverage –
  Affirm covers all premiums for all levels of coverage for you and your dependents.
• Flexible Spending Wallets – generous stipends for technology, food, various lifestyle needs, and family‑forming expenses.
• Time off – competitive vacation and holiday schedules allowing rest and recharge.
• ESPP – Employee stock purchase plan enabling you to buy shares at a discount.

We believe It’s On Us to provide an inclusive interview experience for all, including people with disabilities. We are happy to provide reasonable accommodations to candidates in need of individualized support during the hiring process.

For U.S. positions that could be performed in Los Angeles or San Francisco Pursuant to the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance and Los Angeles Fair Chance Initiative for Hiring Ordinance,
Affirm will consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records.

By clicking “Submit Application,” you acknowledge that you have read Affirm’s Global Candidate Privacy Notice and hereby freely and unambiguously give informed consent to the collection, processing, use, and storage of your personal information as described therein.

Mid‑Senior level

Full‑time

Engineering and Information Technology