Staff Software Engineer, Backend (Growth Platform)

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.

The Growth Platform team builds shared backend platforms that power incentives, experimentation, personalization, and data-driven decisioning across Affirm’s consumer and merchant experiences, directly influencing customer acquisition, engagement, and retention.

What you’ll do

• You will be responsible for setting technical strategy for your team on a year-long time scale, owning backend platforms that power incentives and growth initiatives across Affirm
• You will collaborate with product management, analytics, and partner teams to shape technical direction for incentive systems, ensuring long-term sustainability, correctness, and clear trade-offs that inform roadmap decisions.
• You will act as a force-multiplier by defining platform abstractions, APIs, and architectural patterns that enable product teams to safely launch, experiment with, and evolve incentive-based experiences.
• You take ownership of your team’s operations and availability by ensuring robust monitoring, alerting, playbooks, and on-call practices are in place for business-critical incentive and growth systems.
• You will foster a culture of quality and ownership by setting clear design and code review standards, and advocating for them beyond your immediate team through written proposals and technical discussions.
• You will help develop talent on your team by providing actionable feedback, technical guidance, and leadership on complex, high-impact systems.
  
  

What we look for

• You have 8 years of experience designing, developing, and launching backend systems at scale using languages like Python or Kotlin.
• You have an extensive track record of developing highly available distributed systems using technologies such as AWS, MySQL, Spark, and Kubernetes.
• You have experience building or evolving shared backend platforms that support Rewards, Loyalty, Incentives, Experimentation, or other growth-critical workflows used by multiple product teams.
• You have led complex technical initiatives that required cross-team alignment, long-term architectural thinking, and influence without direct authority.
• You have experience delivering major features, system components, or deprecating existing functionality through the definition and execution of a clear technical plan. You write high quality code that is easily understood and used by others.
• You thrive in ambiguity, and are comfortable moving from low-level language idioms to the architecture of large-scale systems to understand how they work end to end.
• Your growth and impact trajectory demonstrates that you have mastered gathering, incorporating, and iterating on feedback from engineering and cross-functional peers.
• You have strong verbal and written communication skills that support effective collaboration with a global engineering organization.
• This position requires either equivalent practical experience or a Bachelor’s degree in a related field.
  
  

Pay Grade - P

Equity Grade - 13

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: $220,000 - $270,000

USA base pay range (all other U.S. states) per year: $200,000 - $250,000

Remote

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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