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Salary: CAD 181,000 - 0 / annual
Affirm is reinventing credit to make it more honest and friendly, giving consumers flexibility to buy now and pay later without hidden fees or compounding interest.
The Cost Engineering team owns cost visibility and optimization across Affirm's cloud and AI infrastructure. You'll be responsible for telling the business what it's spending, why it's changing, and what to do about it — from AWS resource waste and tagging strategy to AI/LLM spend across the company's growing set of AI tools. The team treats cost anomalies with the same rigor as production incidents, with a severity framework mapped to dollar impact, defined detection sources, TTD/TTR metrics, and escalation paths.
As a Staff Cost Engineer, you'll operate at the intersection of finance, infrastructure, and data engineering. You'll design tooling, automation, and processes that scale cost governance across a fast-growing multi-cloud and multi-AI-vendor footprint. You'll set technical direction for the team, influence cost strategy with infrastructure and platform leaders across the org, and turn ambiguous "why did spend spike" questions into durable systems and self-service tooling. This is a small, high-leverage team where you'll have outsized influence on how Affirm thinks about cost.
Key responsibilities include setting technical strategy on a year-long timescale, collaborating across product development with product management, design, and analytics to ensure technical sustainability, acting as a force-multiplier through technical solutions and operational processes, owning team operations and availability with monitoring and on-call support, fostering a culture of quality through code review and design standards, and developing talent through feedback and mentorship.
You'll need 8+ years designing and launching backend systems at scale using Python or Kotlin, extensive experience with highly available distributed systems (AWS, MySQL, Spark, Kubernetes), hands-on experience with FinOps or cost-visibility platforms (FinOut, CloudHealth, Kubecost), a track record building automation that scales manual processes into self-service systems, and comfort with cloud billing data at scale (AWS Cost & Usage Reports, Snowflake). You should thrive in ambiguity, have strong communication skills, and demonstrate a growth trajectory of gathering and iterating on feedback.
