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Salary: USD 204,000 - 290,000 / annual
Affirm is reinventing credit to make it more honest and friendly, offering consumers flexible buy-now-pay-later options without hidden fees or compounding interest.
As a Staff Software Engineer on the Order Platform team, you will shape the systems powering every Affirm purchase after checkout—orders, captures, refunds, and settlement. You'll drive technical strategy that enables merchants and consumers to transact reliably at scale, raising the bar for reliability and simplicity across engineering systems while maintaining high availability.
You'll work within a small, senior team on high-leverage initiatives within Financial Platforms. The team is currently consolidating the internal platform behind Affirm's post-checkout APIs, drawing clean domain boundaries, migrating existing merchants, and enabling future product launches. In this role, you will set technical direction, mentor strong engineers, and own decisions with multi-year impact.
Key responsibilities include:
- Setting technical strategy on a year-long time scale and connecting it to critical, business-impacting projects
- Collaborating across product, design, and analytics to ensure technical sustainability and manage risks and trade-offs
- Acting as a force-multiplier through definition and advocacy of technical solutions and operational processes
- Owning team operations and availability by establishing monitoring, triage rotations, playbooks, policies, testing, and alerting for on-call support
- Fostering a culture of quality and ownership through code review standards, design standards, and advocacy via writing and tech talks
- Developing talent through feedback, guidance, and leading by example
Required qualifications:
- 8+ years designing, developing, and launching backend systems at scale using Python, Kotlin, or similar languages
- Extensive track record building highly available distributed systems using AWS, MySQL, Spark, Kubernetes, or equivalent technologies
- Strong analytical skills in designing services with clear API boundaries, high reliability, and thoughtful handling of consistency, idempotency, and failure modes—ideally in payments, commerce, ledger, or financially-sensitive domains
- Demonstrated success delivering major features, system components, or deprecating functionality through technical and execution planning
- Ability to write high-quality, easily understood code
- Comfort with ambiguity and moving from low-level language idioms to large-system architecture
- Growth trajectory demonstrating mastery of feedback gathering and iteration with engineering and cross-functional peers
- Strong verbal and written communication skills for effective global collaboration
- Bachelor's degree in a related field or equivalent practical experience
