Staff Software Engineer, Backend (Growth Platform)

Affirm is reinventing credit to make it more honest and friendly, giving consumers the flexibility to buy now and pay later without any hidden fees or compounding interest.

The Growth Platform team builds shared backend platforms that power incentives, experimentation, personalization, and data-driven decisioning across Affirm’s consumer and merchant experiences, directly influencing customer acquisition, engagement, and retention.

What you’ll do

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

You will help develop talent on your team by providing actionable feedback, technical guidance, and leadership on complex, high-impact systems.

What we look for

You have 8+ years of experience designing, developing, and launching backend systems at scale using languages like Python or Kotlin.

You have an extensive track record of developing highly available distributed systems using technologies such as AWS, MySQL, Spark, and Kubernetes.

You have experience building or evolving shared backend platforms that suppor