Software Engineer - SRE, Backend; Reliability Engineering

Staff Software Engineer - SRE, Backend (Reliability Engineering)

Join to apply for the Staff Software Engineer - SRE, Backend (Reliability Engineering) role at Affirm

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 timeline and help tie it to critical, business‑impacting projects.
• Collaborate across teams in the product development lifecycle with infrastructure, product management, developer experience & analytics to ensure technical sustainability, risks, and trade‑offs are well understood and managed.
• Act as a force‑multiplier for your team through the definition and advocacy of technical solutions and operational processes.
• Take ownership of the team's operations and availability by ensuring the right monitoring, triage rotations, playbooks, policies, testing, and alerting are in place to support “keep the lights on” and on‑call efforts.
• Foster a culture of quality and ownership on your team by setting code review and design standards, and advocating for them beyond your team through writing and tech talks.
• Help develop talent on your team by providing feedback and guidance, and leading by example.

• 8+ years of experience designing, developing, 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 technologies like AWS, MySQL, Spark, and Kubernetes.
• Experience managing, driving, and improving the Incident Lifecycle process from live incident management through retrospective and post‑incident analysis to provide actionable insights.
• 7+ years experience on Site Reliability or Production Engineering teams.
• Curiosity with empathy, strong opinions loosely held, and comfort with ambiguity.
• Experience delivering major features, system components, or deprecating existing functionality with a clear technical execution plan and high‑quality code.
• Strong verbal and written communication skills that support effective collaboration with a global engineering team and key stakeholders.
• Either equivalent practical experience or a Bachelor's degree in a related field.

Base Pay Grade: P

Equity Grade: 13

Employees start at the beginning of the pay range. 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 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

Location: Remote - US

• Health care coverage – company covers all premiums for all levels of coverage for you and your dependents.
• Flexible Spending Wallets – generous stipends for spending on technology, food, lifestyle needs, and family‑forming expenses.
• Time off – competitive vacation and holiday schedules allowing you to 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, we will consider qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records.

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