Software Engineer - SRE, Backend; Reliability Engineering

Staff Software Engineer – SRE, Backend (Reliability Engineering)

Join to apply for the Staff Software Engineer – SRE, Backend (Reliability Engineering) role at Affirm
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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.

• Provide data and visibility to teams and leadership on application performance.
• Guide the development of SLOs.
• Drive incident management and analysis processes.
• Steer implementation of change management and deployment practices.
• Engage in service and architectural conversations.
• Recommend observability and alerting configurations.

• Infrastructure, platform and distributed systems.
• Capacity management, load and chaos testing.
• Automation, observability and configuration management.
• Development and product experience.

• Set technical strategy vision for your team over a multi-year timeline, linking it to business-impacting projects.
• Collaborate across product development lifecycle with infrastructure, product management, developer experience & analytics to ensure technical sustainability, risks and trade-offs.
• Act as a force multiplier for your team through advocacy of technical solutions and operational processes.
• Own team operations and availability — monitor, triage rotations, playbooks, policies, testing and alerting to support on‑call and “keep the lights on.”
• Foster a culture of quality and ownership — set code review and design standards and advocate them beyond your team through writing and tech talks.
• Help develop talent by providing feedback, guidance and leading by example.

• 8+ years designing, developing, advocating, and launching backend systems at scale using scripting and development languages like Bash, Python, or Kotlin.
• Extensive track record developing highly available distributed systems using technologies such as AWS, MySQL, Spark, and Kubernetes.
• Proven experience managing/improving incident lifecycle from live incident management through retrospectives and post‑incident analysis.
• 7+ years experience in Site Reliability or Production Engineering teams.
• Curiosity with empathy and strong, loosely held opinions.
• Experience delivering major features or deprecating functionality with a clear technical/execution plan; write high‑quality, easily understood code.
• Thrives in ambiguity, comfortable moving from low‑level language idioms to large system architecture.
• Strong interpersonal and communication skills for collaboration with global engineering teams and stakeholders.
• Either equivalent practical experience or a bachelor’s degree in a related field.

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USA base pay (CA, WA, NY, NJ, CT): $225,000 - $275,000 per year.

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

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

Remote - US (work from any U.S. location; occasional office presence may be required).

• Health care coverage – affirm covers all premiums for all levels; dependent coverage included.
• Flexible Spending Wallets – generous stipends for technology, food, lifestyle needs.
• Time off – competitive vacation and holiday schedules.
• ESPP – employee stock purchase plan with discount.

We’re committed to an inclusive interview experience. We provide reasonable accommodations for candidates who need individualized support during the hiring process. For U.S. positions that could be performed in Los Angeles or San Francisco, affirmative will consider qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records under the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance and Los Angeles Fair Chance Initiative.

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