Staff Software Engineer, Backend (capacity Modeling)

Affirm Affirm · Fintech · Canada, United States · Remote · Infrastructure Platform Eng

Staff Software Engineer, Backend role focused on capacity modeling for a fintech company. The role involves building and maintaining statistical models to forecast traffic and map it to resource requirements (CPU, memory, etc.) for backend systems, ensuring the company can handle peak loads. Responsibilities include setting technical strategy, collaborating with product teams, ensuring operational availability, and fostering a culture of quality. Requires extensive experience in backend systems, distributed systems, and supporting large-scale sales events.

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, policies, 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
  • Python or Kotlin
  • AWS
  • MySQL
  • Spark
  • Kubernetes
  • experience supporting scale up and down of large scale sales event
  • tuned autoscaling, CPU/Memory, and multi-threading for compute type workloads
  • delivering major features, system components or deprecating existing functionality
  • gathering and iterating on feedback from engineering and cross-functional peers
  • strong verbal and written communication skills

Nice to have

  • designing, developing and launching backend systems at scale
  • highly available distributed systems
  • technical strategy
  • product development lifecycle
  • technical solutions and operational processes
  • monitoring, triage rotations, playbooks, policies, testing and alerting
  • code review and design standards
  • feedback and guidance
  • writing and tech talks
  • ambiguity
  • low level language idioms
  • architecture of large systems

What the JD emphasized

  • extensive track record of developing highly available distributed systems
  • experience supporting scale up and down of large scale sales event
  • tuned autoscaling, CPU/Memory, and multi-threading for compute type workloads