[Hiring] Senior Staff Software Engineer, Backend (Compute Platform) @Affirm

Role Description

As a member of the Compute Platform organization, you will collaborate with other teams - including Product, Infrastructure, Traffic, Cost & Capacity Engineering to:

• Architect and evolve Affirm's EKS platform, driving strategy across cluster lifecycle, node management, and shared cluster components
• Lead the technical direction for cluster provisioning, upgrades, and teardown through standardized IaC (Terraform, Spacelift) and self-service workflows
• Own the reliability of core shared components across the fleet (Karpenter, CoreDNS, VPC CNI, Kube Proxy, Metrics Server, etc) and the CI/CD pipeline that ships them consistently
• Define and enforce EKS workload safety standards covering resource configuration, workload isolation and blast radius, disruption tolerance (PDBs), Karpenter consolidation strategies, etc
• Build the enforcement and automation path that moves each standard from research and white-glove onboarding through broad adoption to policy-enforced defaults for new workloads
• Establish the observability, baseline audits, and reporting needed to identify hot spots and measure risk mitigation over time
• Partner with cluster-user teams (checkout, batch, ML, analytics, DevProd, etc) to understand workload needs and shape the platform accordingly
• Drive cost and capacity strategy across node scaling, bin packing, and EC2 instance selection
• Mentor engineers across the Compute Platform teams and set the bar for operational excellence
• Participate in the on-call rotation, triage and catalogue runtime K8s issues, and collaborate with SRE on production incidents

Qualifications

• 10+ years in software or infrastructure engineering with proven delivery of complex platform solutions
• 6+ years hands-on operating production Kubernetes at scale, ideally EKS on AWS
• Strong cloud-native architecture experience on AWS (EC2, VPC, IAM, EKS)
• Experience with Infrastructure-as-Code (Terraform, Spacelift a plus) and GitOps-style deployment pipelines
• Expert-level proficiency in Go or Python and a proven track record building production-grade Kubernetes controllers, operators, and platform tooling that other engineering teams depend on
• Track record designing and enforcing standards across many teams without becoming a bottleneck
• Exceptional problem-solving and systems-thinking skills
• Demonstrated leadership and cross-functional influence
• This position requires either equivalent practical experience or a Bachelor’s degree in a related field.

Requirements

• Deep EKS and Kubernetes internals expertise, including cluster upgrades, node lifecycle, scheduling, and autoscaling (Karpenter, Cluster Autoscaler)
• Demonstrated experience automating Kubernetes operations at fleet scale, from cluster provisioning, upgrades, and node lifecycle to self-healing remediation and policy-driven enforcement, replacing manual toil with auditable, self-service workflows
• Strong grasp of workload reliability patterns: resource tuning, probes, PDBs, topology and isolation constraints
• Experience designing and enforcing platform standards through policy (admission control, OPA/Gatekeeper or equivalent) and automated frameworks
• Infrastructure as Code fluency with Terraform and a GitOps or pipeline-driven delivery model (ArgoCD, kube-applier, or similar)
• Observability instincts: defining SLOs, building metrics, logs, and alerting coverage, and running data-driven baseline audits
• Cross-functional collaboration skills with platform, product, SRE, and capacity teams
• Demonstrated mentorship and technical leadership across teams
• Drive to track emerging Kubernetes community best practices and adapt them to Affirm's needs

Benefits

• Health coverage at no cost: We cover 100% of premiums for employees and their dependents.
• Spending stipends: Monthly stipends support your tech setup, and the ability to choose health and wellness options that are right for you.
• Time off to recharge: Flexible time off and generous holiday calendars help you rest when you need to.
• Own a piece of what you build: Our employee stock purchase plan (ESPP) lets you buy Affirm stock at a discount.