Senior Staff Software Engineer (Reliability)

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.

Join us to accelerate and ensure the resilience of Affirm’s ecosystem of honest financial products! We are looking for a Senior Staff Software Engineer to build and evangelize Reliability practices throughout Affirm’s Infrastructure team and beyond.

Reliability Engineering at Affirm is a small yet crucial team, building out the SRE Central Model that creates reliability best practices, tooling, frameworks, and then drives their adoption across Affirm. Our Vision is to enable all teams to “operate what they own” with excellence, while providing white-glove support for critical services that deliver our most impactful products to Affirm’s customers.

What You'll Do

• In coordination with senior ICs and stakeholder teams, create and champion a long-term technical roadmap for the creation and adoption of reliability practices across Affirm
• Promote culture of ownership, curiosity, and data-driven decision making
• Elevate architecture, technical design, and code review with resiliency as a first class citizen, coaching team members on effective design and code reviews with the customer journey as the primary focus
• Influence and provide reliability guidance to Infrastructure teams to deliver solutions that improve customer experience
• Drive and simplify cross functional investigations around complex issues involving people, software, and systems
• Engage with product management to understand their needs, accelerate feature development velocity, and enable improved insights into their service while improving operational reliability
• Support the growth of the Infrastructure organization by hiring, coaching, and supporting senior engineers in technical contributor roles
• Foster a culture of technical excellence, humility, constant improvement, and rigor within your team to enable them to undertake challenges across multiple technical domains
• Provide leadership in the implementation of incident management and reliability principles
• Focus on the human interaction with reliability systems to enable quicker incident resolution
  
  

What We Look For

• 10+ years of software development experience, including at least one of the following: Python, Kotlin, Rust, Java, C++, GoLang
• Expertise in synthesizing complex technical requirements, designs, trade-offs, and capabilities into clear decisions, and influence product direction
• Ability to communicate decisions and practices to the engineering organization effectively
• At least 5+ years of experience in at least two different SRE organizational structures
• At least 5+ years of experience of hands-on work in infrastructure and scaling distributed systems
• At least 5+ years of technical leadership on SWE and Reliability teams focussed on infrastructure, reliability, and software engineering at scale
• Strong hands-on experience with k8s and AWS in a production environment
• Experience in encouraging a strong engineering culture and improving reliability in a growing company, including the ability to work closely with other senior and staff engineers to drive change
• Track record of successfully mentoring and developing technical leaders
• Deep knowledge of incident management, post-incident review, and incident analysis
• Expertise in developing and implementing effective Service Level Indicators (SLIs) and Service Level Objectives (SLOs)
• This position requires either equivalent practical experience or a Bachelor’s degree in a related field.
  
  

Base Pay Grade - R

Equity Grade - 15

Employees new to Affirm typically come in at the start of the pay range. Affirm focuses on providing a simple and transparent pay structure which is based on a variety of factors, including location, experience and job-related skills.

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: $260,000 - $310,000

USA base pay range (all other U.S. states) per year: $232,000 - $282,000

Location: Remote - US

Affirm is proud to be a remote-first company! The majority of our roles are remote and you can work almost anywhere within the country of employment. Affirmers in proximal roles have the flexibility to work remotely, but will occasionally be required to work out of their assigned Affirm office. A limited number of roles remain office-based due to the nature of their job responsibilities.

Benefits

We’re extremely proud to offer competitive benefits that are anchored to our core value of people come first. Some key highlights of our benefits package include:

• Health care coverage - Affirm covers all premiums for all levels of coverage for you and your dependents
• Flexible Spending Wallets - generous stipends for spending on Technology, Food, various Lifestyle needs, and family forming expenses
• Time off - competitive vacation and holiday schedules allowing you to take time off to rest and recharge
• ESPP - An employee stock purchase plan enabling you to buy shares of Affirm 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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