Staff Software Engineer, Backend (Code to Environments)

Developer Productivity exists to make work better for every engineer at Affirm. Our mission is to simplify and accelerate software development across the company. We own the entire space between a developer’s laptop and production, including ephemeral dev environments, CI/CD pipelines, test automation frameworks, dependency management, and release engineering. Our tools and platforms enable engineers to ship code quickly, safely, and with confidence. This team supports over 900 engineers working across a broad stack in a hypergrowth Fintech environment—a complex, high-leverage challenge with impact at scale.

What You'll Do

• You will be responsible for setting technical strategy for your team on a year-long time scale, and help your team tie it together with critical, business-impacting projects.
• You will collaborate across teams in the product development lifecycle by collaborating with product management, design & analytics to ensure technical sustainability, risks and trade-offs are well understood and managed.
• You will act as a force-multiplier for your team through your definition and advocacy of technical solutions and operational processes.
• You take ownership of your team’s operations and availability by ensuring you have the right monitoring, triage rotations, playbooks, policies, testing and alerting in place to support “keep the lights on” & on-call efforts.
• You will foster a culture of quality and ownership on your team by conducting high quality code review and design standards for your team, and advocating for them beyond your team through your writing and tech talks, and increasing collaboration through practices like pair programming and knowledge sharing
• You will help develop talent on your team by providing feedback and guidance, and leading by example.

What We Look For

• You have 8+ years of experience designing, developing and launching backend or infrastructure systems at scale using languages like Python or Kotlin.
• Your growth and impact trajectory demonstrates that you have mastered proactively gathering and iterating on feedback from your engineering and cross-functional peers.
• You have an extensive track record of supporting highly available distributed systems using technologies like AWS (GCP, Azure), distributed Databases, containerization, and Kubernetes. You have active experience building scalable infrastructure components including pipelines (Jenkins, Buildkite, GitHub Actions), configuration management, and automation.
• You have experience delivering major features, system components or deprecating existing functionality in a system through the definition of a technical and execution plan. You write high quality code that is easily understood and used by others.
• You thrive in ambiguity, and are comfortable moving from language idioms all the way to the architecture of large systems to deeply understand how they work.
• You have strong verbal and written communication skills that support effective collaboration with our global and remote engineering team.
• You have experience owning, managing, and building developer environments, if they’re ephemeral, that’s a bonus.
• This position requires either equivalent practical experience or a Bachelor’s degree in a related field.