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Salary: CAD 153,000 - 213,000 / annual
Affirm is seeking a Senior Software Engineer to join the Workload Safety team, which owns the standards and enforcement for how workloads run across Affirm's 85+ Amazon EKS clusters globally. This is a high-impact infrastructure role focused on ensuring availability, latency, and cost efficiency at scale.
You will define and evolve workload safety standards covering CPU/memory settings, workload isolation, placement policies, disruption tolerance, and graceful termination. You'll own each standard end-to-end: research and prototyping, white-glove onboarding for early adopters, self-service guidance, and automation/policy guardrails that enforce compliance by default.
Key responsibilities include:
- Leading cross-team initiatives from design through fleet-wide rollout, mentoring engineers, and setting high bars for design and operational readiness
- Isolating workloads by criticality and resource profile to prevent misbehaving workloads from degrading critical paths like checkout
- Fixing stuck workloads and node lifecycle problems (pods ignoring termination signals, pod disruption budgets blocking node cycling, Karpenter timeouts)
- Determining safe operating limits for each cluster and developing control plane scaling patterns for bursty workloads
- Analyzing workload resource profiles (CPU, memory, disk, network) to guide EC2 instance type strategy
- Measuring each standard's impact on availability, latency, risk, and cost to prioritize roadmap
- Participating in on-call for Kubernetes runtime issues and turning recurring patterns into roadmap items
- Collaborating closely with service, batch, ML, deployment, capacity, and SRE teams
- Staying current with Kubernetes community best practices and adapting them to Affirm's needs
Affirm runs a remote-first operation with flexibility. New hires attend an in-person onboarding experience. The role is open to candidates residing in Alberta, British Columbia, Manitoba, New Brunswick, Newfoundland and Labrador, Nova Scotia, Ontario, Prince Edward Island, or Saskatchewan.
Requirements:
- 5+ years of experience running Kubernetes in production at scale, ideally Amazon EKS across many clusters
- Deep understanding of Kubernetes resource management and scheduling: requests and limits, OOM and CPU throttling behavior, affinity and anti-affinity, taints and tolerations, topology spread constraints
- Solid grasp of pod lifecycle and disruption management, including graceful termination, pod disruption budgets, and node draining
- Experience enforcing configuration standards through admission control and policy-as-code (e.g., OPA Gatekeeper or Kyverno)
- Proficiency in Go or Python, including building production infrastructure software such as Kubernetes controllers, operators, or admission webhooks
- Strong production debugging skills and demonstrated ability to turn recurring incidents into systemic fixes
- Track record of leading technical initiatives across multiple teams, driving adoption of shared standards, and mentoring engineers
- Experience quantifying the impact of infrastructure changes on availability, latency, and cost
- Strong written communication, including standards and guidance that teams can adopt independently
