Senior Software Engineer, Backend; ML Feature Platform

Remote US

At affirm, we exist for the moments that matter—giving people a clear, predictable way to pay over time, with no hidden fees, no surprises, and no tradeoffs on what matters most.

The Engineering team builds systems that power affirm’s mission. We take pride in our craft, building reliable, performant, and scalable solutions that touch every part of the business. Whether we’re enabling new ways to pay, ensuring our platforms can scale to the most demanding levels in the industry, or developing seamless servicing experiences, our focus is on solving complex problems through exceptional engineering.

ML Feature Platform is one of the two teams that compose the ML Platform at affirm, the other team being ML Training & Serving Platform. The two platform teams work closely together to create the ML + Data flywheel that empowers affirm.

ML Feature Platform’s mission is to:
Grow affirm’s business by building a delightful, self-serve platform for developing and serving data for machine learning and decisioning.

As the feature platform team, we own multiple artifacts that in aggregate own the end-to-end flows for features. This includes:

• Feature creation, exploration, and serving
• Data storage, availability, and visibility
• Offline back filling infrastructure and platform improvements

This scope means your work will have a direct impact on the everyday lives and capabilities for our end users: MLEs, Analysts, and decisioning teams. Additionally as the primary data source for ML and online decisioning, our platform’s performance is critical to affirm’s availability and latency goals.

We’re looking for engineers who are passionate about ML enablement and believe that platform level improvements can bring snowball effects across the company.

• 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.

• You have 4+ years of experience designing, developing and launching backend systems at scale using languages like Python or Kotlin.
• You have a track record of developing highly available distributed systems using technologies like AWS, MySQL and Kubernetes.
• 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…