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
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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 scale and align it with business‑impacting projects.
• Collaborate across teams in the product development lifecycle, working with infrastructure, product management, developer experience & analytics to manage technical sustainability, risks and trade‑offs.
• Advocate technical solutions and operational processes to act as a force‑multiplier for your team.
• Own operations and availability by ensuring monitoring, triage rotations, playbooks, policies, testing and alerting support keep the lights on and on‑call efforts.
• Foster a culture of quality and ownership by setting code review and design standards and advocating them through writing and tech talks.
• Develop talent on your team by providing feedback, guidance and leading by example.

• 8+ years of experience designing, developing, advocating as a point of reference, 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 such as AWS, MySQL, Spark and Kubernetes.
• Proven experience managing, driving and improving the Incident Livecycle process from incident management through post‑incident analysis to provide actionable insights.
• 7+ years of experience in Site Reliability or Production Engineering teams.
• Curiosity with empathy and strong, loosely held opinions.
• Experience delivering major features, system components or deprecating functionality with a clear technical and execution plan. Write high‑quality, maintainable code.
• Comfortable with ambiguity, moving from low‑level language idioms to large‑scale system architecture.
• Strong growth trajectory and ability to gather and iterate on feedback from engineering and cross‑functional peers.
• Excellent verbal and written communication skills supporting collaboration with global engineering teams and stakeholders.
• 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. Affirms remote‑first culture allows work anywhere within the U.S. Occasionally, some roles may require occasional in‑office presence.

• Health care coverage – company 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 forming expenses.
• Time off – competitive vacation and holiday schedules.
• ESPP – Employee Stock Purchase Plan enabling share purchases 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.

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