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Affirm is building its own bank and seeking a Staff Software Engineer to serve as a technical anchor for the engineering team that runs it. This is a rare opportunity to shape a new business from its earliest systems—a startup-like build inside an established company—with ownership that extends beyond individual project delivery.
You will set technical direction across the bank's core systems, including vendor-integrated banking infrastructure, the data platform, and operational tooling. Your responsibilities include owning the medium-to-long-term technical strategy for cloud infrastructure, data platforms, core banking configuration, CI/CD, networking, and the critical Bank ↔ Affirm Inc integration boundary. You'll personally design, build, integrate, and operate the most ambiguous and highest-stakes pieces of the stack, taking problems no one else can fully scope and turning them into well-defined systems with clear failure domains, monitoring, and runbooks.
As a force multiplier on a deliberately small, AI-native team, you'll set and hold the bar for code review, design review, and examiner-readable documentation. You'll establish patterns and standards that let a small team punch far above its size and level up every engineer who joins. The role emphasizes AI-first thinking—treating AI tools and agentic workflows as load-bearing capabilities for code, design review, runbook generation, and operations.
You'll lead vendor selection and ownership across the bank's third-party platforms (core, data, identity, observability, card processing), carrying the bank's most critical vendor relationships end-to-end. You'll define the integration boundary with Affirm Inc, setting domain edges, data flows, and integration patterns so the bank's products work seamlessly in the Affirm ecosystem while preserving legal and regulatory separation.
Building for examiners is core to this role. You'll partner with Legal, Compliance, Risk, BSA/AML, Finance, and Internal Audit so compliance is a product property from day one. The systems you design are artifacts FDIC and state examiners will inspect. You'll own the operational posture of the bank's systems—reliability, observability, alerting, runbooks, incident response, and disaster recovery—while keeping the operational footprint intentionally small. Finally, you'll influence up and across the organization, communicating technical strategy and tradeoffs with clarity to bank executives, the Bank Board, and engineers across Affirm.
