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Salary: USD 204,000 - 290,000 / annual
Affirm is seeking a Staff Software Engineer for the Trust and Safety Foundations team within Checkout Engineering. This role focuses on building and operating foundational systems and data capabilities that support how Affirm understands consumer risk and meets credit reporting obligations. The work sits at the intersection of data quality, system reliability, regulatory requirements, and risk, creating critical infrastructure that Affirm and its partners depend on to operate accurately and at scale.
As a Staff Software Engineer on Trust and Safety Foundations, you will help shape the team's technical strategy and lead complex, business-critical initiatives across systems and stakeholders. You'll turn ambiguous problems into clear technical approaches, guide projects from strategy through execution, and strengthen the reliability and sustainability of the systems the team owns. You'll act as a force multiplier by raising the bar for system design and engineering quality, sharing expertise, and helping other engineers grow.
Key responsibilities include:
- Setting technical strategy for your team on a year-long time scale and tying it together with critical, business-impacting projects
- Collaborating across teams in the product development lifecycle with product management, 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
- Taking ownership of team operations and availability by ensuring proper monitoring, triage rotations, playbooks, policies, testing, and alerting for on-call efforts
- Fostering a culture of quality and ownership by setting code review and design standards, and advocating for them through writing and tech talks
- Developing talent on your team through feedback, guidance, and leading by example
Requirements:
- 8+ years of experience designing, developing, and launching backend systems at scale using languages like Python or Kotlin
- Extensive track record developing highly available distributed systems using technologies like AWS, MySQL, Spark, and Kubernetes
- Experience delivering major features, system components, or deprecating existing functionality through definition of technical and execution plans; ability to write high-quality code that is easily understood and used by others
- Ability to thrive in ambiguity and move from low-level language idioms to large system architecture
- Growth and impact trajectory demonstrating mastery of gathering and iterating on feedback from engineering and cross-functional peers
- Strong verbal and written communication skills supporting effective collaboration with global engineering teams
- Bachelor's degree in a related field or equivalent practical experience
