Software Engineer, Backend; Platform

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 Affirms consumer and merchant experiences, directly influencing customer acquisition, engagement, and retention.

• 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 Affirms.
• 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 will 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.

• 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 support Rewards, Loyalty, Incentives, Experimentation, or other growth‑critical workflows used by multiple product teams.
• You have led complex technical initiatives that required cross‑team alignment, long‑term architectural thinking, and influence without direct authority.
• You have experience delivering major features, system components, or deprecating existing functionality through the definition and execution of a clear technical plan. You write high quality code that is easily understood and used by others.
• You thrive in ambiguity, and are comfortable moving from low‑level language idioms to the architecture of large‑scale systems to understand how they work end to end.
• Your growth and impact trajectory demonstrates that you have mastered gathering, incorporating, and iterating on feedback from engineering and cross‑functional peers.
• You have strong verbal and written communication skills that support effective collaboration with a global engineering organization.
• This position requires either equivalent practical experience or a Bachelor’s degree in a related field.

Pay Grade – P

Equity Grade – 13

Base pay is part of a total compensation package that may include equity rewards, monthly stipends for health, wellness and tech spending, and benefits (including 100% subsidized medical coverage, dental and vision for you and your dependents).

USA base pay range (CA, WA, NY, NJ, CT) per year: $220,000 - $270,000.

USA base pay range (all other U.S. states) per year: $200,000 - $250,000.

Affirm is proud to be a remote‑first company! The majority of our roles are remote and you can work almost anywhere within the country of employment. Employees in proximal roles have the flexibility to work remotely, but will occasionally be required to work out of their assigned office. A limited number of roles remain office‑based due to the nature of their job responsibilities.

• Health care coverage – affirm covers all premiums for all levels of coverage for you and your dependents.
• Flexible Spending Wallets – generous stipends for spending on technology, food, various lifestyle needs, and…