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

• 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 align it with critical business‑impacting projects.
• Collaborate across product development teams, ensuring technical sustainability, risks, and trade‑offs are well understood.
• Act as a force‑multiplier by defining and advocating technical solutions and processes.
• Own team operations and availability, managing monitoring, triage rotations, playbooks, policies, testing, and alerting.
• Foster a culture of quality and ownership, setting code‑review and design standards for the team.
• Develop team talent through feedback, guidance, and leading by example.

• 8+ years designing, developing, and launching backend systems at scale using scripting and development languages such as Bash, Python, or Kotlin.
• Extensive track record developing highly available distributed systems using technologies like AWS, MySQL, Spark, and Kubernetes.
• Proven success managing and improving the Incident Lifecycle process, from live incident management to post‑incident analysis.
• 7+ years experience in Site Reliability or Production Engineering teams.
• Curiosity, empathy, and strong yet loosely held opinions.
• Experience delivering major features and deprecating functionality with well‑defined technical and execution plans.
• Comfortable moving from low‑level language idioms to large‑system architecture.
• Track record of gathering and iterating on feedback from peers and cross‑functional teams.
• Strong verbal and written communication skills supporting collaboration with a global engineering team and stakeholders.
• Required either equivalent practical experience or a Bachelor’s degree in a related field.

Base Pay Grade: P

Equity Grade: 13

Employees new to Affirm typically start at the beginning of the pay range. Total compensation may include equity rewards, monthly stipends for health, wellness, and tech spending, and benefits such as 100% subsidized medical coverage, dental, and vision for you and your dependents.

• CA, WA, NY, NJ, CT – $225,000 - $275,000 per year
• All other U.S. states – $200,000 - $250,000 per year

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, lifestyle needs, and family formation expenses
• Time off – competitive vacation and holiday schedules allowing you to rest and recharge
• ESPP – Employee Stock Purchase Plan enabling you to buy Affirm 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 qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records.

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