Senior Staff Software Engineer, Backend (Compute Platform)
Affirm · Remote US
About this role
## Senior Staff Software Engineer, Backend (Compute Platform) ### About Affirm 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. Affirm’s engineering team builds large-scale, highly available, global infrastructure shared across multiple financial products. We value thorough technical design review, operational excellence, and capable incident response and analysis. ### What you’ll do As a member of the Compute Platform organization, you’ll collaborate with teams across Product, Infrastructure, Traffic, Cost & Capacity Engineering to: - Architect and evolve Affirm’s EKS platform across cluster lifecycle, node management, and shared cluster components - Lead technical direction for cluster provisioning, upgrades, and teardown using standardized IaC (Terraform, Spacelift) and self-service workflows - Own reliability of core shared components across the fleet (e.g., Karpenter, CoreDNS, VPC CNI, Kube Proxy, Metrics Server) and the CI/CD pipeline that ships them consistently - Define and enforce EKS workload safety standards (resource configuration, workload isolation/blast radius, disruption tolerance via PDBs, Karpenter consolidation strategies, etc.) - Build the enforcement and automation path from research/white-glove onboarding to broad adoption and policy-enforced defaults - Establish observability, baseline audits, and reporting to identify hot spots and measure risk mitigation over time - Partner with cluster-user teams (checkout, batch, ML, analytics, DevProd, etc.) to shape the platform around workload needs - Drive cost and capacity strategy across node scaling, bin packing, and EC2 instance selection - Mentor engineers and set the bar for operational excellence - Participate in on-call rotation, triage runtime Kubernetes issues, and collaborate with SRE on production incidents ### What we look for - Deep EKS and Kubernetes internals expertise (cluster upgrades, node lifecycle, scheduling, autoscaling—Karpenter, Cluster Autoscaler) - Experience automating Kubernetes operations at fleet scale (provisioning, upgrades, node lifecycle, self-healing remediation, policy-driven enforcement) - Strong understanding of workload reliability patterns (resource tuning, probes, PDBs, topology/isolation constraints) - Experience designing and enforcing platform standards through policy (admission control, OPA/Gatekeeper or equivalent) - Infrastructure as Code fluency with Terraform and GitOps/pipeline-driven delivery (ArgoCD, kube-applier, or similar) - Observability instincts (SLOs, metrics/logs/alerting coverage, data-driven baseline audits) - Cross-functional collaboration with platform, product, SRE, and capacity teams - Demonstrated mentorship and technical leadership - Drive to track Kubernetes community best practices and adapt them to Affirm’s needs ### Qualifications - 10+ years in software or infrastructure engineering with proven delivery of complex platform solutions - 6+ years hands-on operating production Kubernetes at scale (ideally EKS on AWS) - Strong cloud-native architecture experience on AWS (EC2, VPC, IAM, EKS) - Experience with Infrastructure-as-Code (Terraform; Spacelift a plus) and GitOps-style deployment pipelines - Expert-level proficiency in Go or Python, with a track record building production-grade Kubernetes controllers/operators/platform tooling - Track record designing and enforcing
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