Staff Software Engineer

Affirm Affirm · Fintech · Poland · Remote · Consumer Engineering

Staff Software Engineer at Affirm, a fintech company, focusing on the Marketplace Experience team. The role involves technical leadership, defining and driving long-term technical strategy for backend systems, and ensuring high standards for performance, reliability, and quality. Responsibilities include setting technical strategy, collaborating with product management and design, owning team operations and availability, fostering a culture of quality, and mentoring engineers. Requires 8+ years of experience in backend systems, distributed systems (AWS, MySQL, Spark, Kubernetes), and launching major features.

What you'd actually do

  1. You will be responsible for setting technical strategy for your team on a year-long time scale, and help your team tie it together with critical, business-impacting projects.
  2. You will collaborate across teams in the product development lifecycle by collaborating with product management, design & analytics to ensure technical sustainability, risks and trade-offs are well understood and managed.
  3. You will act as a force-multiplier for your team through your definition and advocacy of technical solutions and operational processes.
  4. You take ownership of your team’s operations and availability by ensuring you have the right monitoring, triage rotations, playbooks, polcities, testing and alerting in place to support “keep the lights on” & on-call efforts.
  5. You will foster a culture of quality and ownership on your team by setting code review and design standards for your team, and advocating for them beyond your team through your writing and tech talks.

Skills

Required

  • 8+ years of experience designing, developing and launching backend systems at scale
  • languages like Python or Kotlin
  • highly available distributed systems
  • AWS
  • MySQL
  • Spark
  • Kubernetes
  • delivering major features, system components or deprecating existing functionality
  • high quality code that is easily understood and used by others
  • navigating ambiguity
  • gathering and iterating on feedback
  • strong verbal and written communication skills

What the JD emphasized

  • extensive track record of developing highly available distributed systems
  • delivering major features, system components or deprecating existing functionality in a system through the definition of a technical and execution plan
  • mastered gathering and iterating on feedback from your engineering and cross-functional peers