Responsible for setting technical strategy for your team on a year-long time scale, owning backend platforms that power incentives and growth initiatives across Affirm.
Collaborate with product management, analytics, and partner teams to shape technical direction for incentive systems, ensuring long-term sustainability, correctness, and clear trade-offs that inform roadmap decisions.
Act as a force-multiplier by defining platform abstractions, APIs, and architectural patterns that enable product teams to safely launch, experiment with, and evolve incentive-based experiences.
Take ownership of your team’s operations and availability by ensuring robust monitoring, alerting, playbooks, and on-call practices are in place for business-critical incentive and growth systems.
Foster a culture of quality and ownership by setting clear design and code review standards, advocating for them beyond your immediate team through written proposals and technical discussions.
Help develop talent on your team by providing actionable feedback, technical guidance, and leadership on complex, high-impact systems.

Requirements

8+ years of experience designing, developing, and launching backend systems at scale using languages like Python or Kotlin.
Extensive track record of developing highly available distributed systems using technologies such as AWS, MySQL, Spark, and Kubernetes.
Experience building or evolving shared backend platforms that support Rewards, Loyalty, Incentives, Experimentation, or other growth-critical workflows used by multiple product teams.
Led complex technical initiatives that required cross-team alignment, long-term architectural thinking, and influence without direct authority.
Experience delivering major features, system components, or deprecating existing functionality through the definition and execution of a clear technical plan.
Thrive in ambiguity, comfortable moving from low-level language idioms to the architecture of large-scale systems to understand how they work end to end.
Strong verbal and written communication skills that support effective collaboration with a global engineering organization.
This position requires either equivalent practical experience or a Bachelor’s degree in a related field.

Benefits

Health care coverage - Affirm covers all premiums for all levels of coverage for you and your dependents
Flexible Spending Wallets - generous stipends for spending on Technology, Food, various Lifestyle needs, and family forming expenses
Time off - competitive vacation and holiday schedules allowing you to take time off to rest and recharge
ESPP - An employee stock purchase plan enabling you to buy shares of Affirm at a discount

Applicant Tracking System Keywords

Tip: use these terms in your resume and cover letter to boost ATS matches.

backend systemsPythonKotlindistributed systemsAWSMySQLSparkKubernetesAPIsarchitectural patterns

leadershipcollaborationcommunicationfeedbacktechnical guidanceownershipquality advocacyinfluence without authorityproblem-solvingadaptability

Bachelor's degree