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.

• 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

• Set technical strategy vision for your team on a multi‑year time scale and align it with critical, business‑impacting projects.
• Collaborate across teams in the product development lifecycle, ensuring technical sustainability, risks and trade‑offs are well understood and managed.
• Act as a force‑multiplier through advocacy of technical solutions and operational processes.
• Take ownership of operations and availability, ensuring the right monitoring, triage rotations, playbooks, policies, testing and alerting are in place for “keep the lights on” and on‑call efforts.
• Foster a culture of quality and ownership by setting code‑review and design standards and advocating for them beyond the team.
• Help develop talent by providing feedback, guidance, and leading by example.

• 8+ years designing, developing, advocating and launching backend systems at scale using scripting and development languages such as Bash, Python or Kotlin.
• Extensive track record of developing highly available distributed systems using AWS, MySQL, Spark and Kubernetes.
• Experience managing, driving and improving the Incident Lifecycle process from live incident management through retrospectives and post‑incident analysis to enhance reliability, resilience and performance.
• 7+ years in Site Reliability or Production Engineering teams.
• Curiosity with empathy, and strong opinions loosely held.
• Experience delivering major features, system components or deprecating existing functionality in a system with a clear technical and execution plan. Writes high‑quality, easy‑to‑understand code.
• Thrives in ambiguity, comfortable moving from low‑level language idioms to large‑system architecture.
• Demonstrated growth and impact trajectory in gathering and iterating on feedback from engineering and cross‑functional peers.
• Strong verbal and written communication skills for effective collaboration with a global team and stakeholders.
• Either equivalent practical experience or a Bachelor’s degree in a related field.

Base Pay Grade: P
Equity Grade: 13
USA base pay range (CA, WA, NY, NJ, CT) per year: $225,000 - $275,000
USA base pay range (all other U.S. states) per year: $200,000 - $250,000

Remote – US. Confirmed remote‑first company. Roles may occasionally require presence at an assigned Affirm office.

• Health care coverage – all premiums covered for all levels of coverage for you and your dependents.
• Flexible Spending Wallets – generous stipends for technology, food, lifestyle needs and family‑forming expenses.
• Time off – competitive vacation and holiday schedules.
• ESPP – employee stock purchase plan allowing shares to be bought at a discount.

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[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, we will consider qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records.

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