Staff Software Engineer, Backend – Capacity Modeling

Affirm

Staff Software Engineer at Affirm responsible for Capacity Modeling team and traffic management. Leading technical strategy and collaborating across teams on critical projects.

Posted 5/8/2026full-timeRemote • 🇺🇸 United StatesLead💰 $200,000 - $250,000 per yearWebsite

Tech Stack

Tools & technologies

AWSDistributed SystemsKotlinKubernetesMySQLPythonSpark

About the role

Key responsibilities & impact

Responsible for setting technical strategy for team on a year-long time scale
Collaborate across teams in the product development lifecycle ensuring technical sustainability
Act as a force-multiplier for the team through definition and advocacy of technical solutions
Take ownership of team operations and availability through monitoring and triage
Foster a culture of quality on the team by setting code review and design standards
Help develop talent by providing feedback and guidance, and leading by example

Requirements

What you’ll need

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 like AWS, MySQL, Spark and Kubernetes.
Experience supporting scale up and down of large scale sales events such as Prime Day, Black Friday Cyber Monday, or other sales holidays
Tuned autoscaling, CPU/Memory, and multi-threading for compute type workloads.
Experience delivering major features, system components or deprecating existing functionality in a system through the definition of a technical and execution plan.
Strong understanding of low level language idioms to large systems architecture.
Growth and impact trajectory demonstrating mastery in gathering and iterating on feedback from engineering and cross-functional peers.
Strong verbal and written communication skills that support effective collaboration with our global engineering team.
This position requires either equivalent practical experience or a Bachelor’s degree in a related field.

Benefits

Comp & perks

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

ATS Keywords

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Applicant Tracking System Keywords

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Hard Skills & Tools

PythonKotlinAWSMySQLSparkKubernetesdistributed systemsautoscalingmulti-threadingsystem architecture

Soft Skills

collaborationleadershipfeedbackguidancecommunicationownershipquality assuranceadvocacytechnical strategyculture building

Certifications

Bachelor’s degree