Staff Software Engineer, Backend (growth Platform)

Affirm Affirm · Fintech · Canada, United States · Remote · Consumer Engineering

Staff Software Engineer, Backend (Growth Platform) at Affirm, focusing on building shared backend platforms for incentives, experimentation, personalization, and data-driven decisioning to influence customer acquisition, engagement, and retention. The role involves setting technical strategy, collaborating with product and analytics teams, defining platform abstractions and APIs, ensuring operational excellence, and fostering a culture of quality. Requires 8+ years of experience in backend systems, distributed systems (AWS, Spark, Kubernetes), and building shared platforms for growth-critical workflows.

What you'd actually do

  1. You will be 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
  2. You will 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.
  3. You will 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.
  4. You 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.
  5. You will foster a culture of quality and ownership by setting clear design and code review standards, and advocating for them beyond your immediate team through written proposals and technical discussions.

Skills

Required

  • 8+ years of experience designing, developing, and launching backend systems at scale
  • highly available distributed systems
  • building or evolving shared backend platforms
  • led complex technical initiatives
  • Python or Kotlin
  • AWS
  • MySQL
  • Spark
  • Kubernetes

Nice to have

  • Rewards
  • Loyalty
  • Incentives
  • Experimentation
  • growth-critical workflows
  • cross-team alignment
  • influence without direct authority
  • delivering major features
  • system components
  • deprecating existing functionality
  • clear technical plan
  • high quality code
  • gathering, incorporating, and iterating on feedback
  • strong verbal and written communication skills

What the JD emphasized

  • backend platforms
  • incentive systems
  • growth initiatives
  • backend systems at scale
  • highly available distributed systems
  • shared backend platforms
  • complex technical initiatives
  • long-term architectural thinking