Senior Software Engineer, Backend (Workload Safety)

Location: Remote US; other location: Remote Canada. Most roles can be done from almost anywhere within the country of employment. Occasional in-person work at an Affirm office and in-person onboarding may be required.

USA base pay range: $195,000–$255,000 per year for CA, WA, NY, NJ, and CT; $173,000–$233,000 per year for all other U.S. states.

Company

Affirm provides transparent buy-now-pay-later financial products and operates large-scale infrastructure shared across multiple financial products.

What you will do

• Define and evolve workload safety standards for more than 85 Amazon EKS clusters, covering resource settings, workload isolation, placement, disruption tolerance, and graceful termination.
• Own standards from research and prototyping through early-adopter onboarding, self-service guidance, policy guardrails, and fleet-wide automation.
• Lead cross-team initiatives, mentor engineers, and set standards for technical design, code review, and operational readiness.
• Resolve stuck workloads and node lifecycle issues, including termination signals, pod disruption budgets, Karpenter timeouts, bin packing, and excess capacity removal.
• Determine safe cluster operating limits, develop control-plane scaling patterns, and analyze CPU, memory, disk, and network profiles to guide EC2 instance strategy.
• Measure impacts on availability, latency, risk, and cost; participate in Kubernetes runtime on-call; and collaborate with service, batch, ML workload, deployment, capacity, and SRE teams.

Requirements

• 5+ years of experience running Kubernetes in production at scale, ideally Amazon EKS across many clusters.
• Deep understanding of Kubernetes resource management and scheduling, including requests and limits, OOM behavior, CPU throttling, affinity and anti-affinity, taints and tolerations, and topology spread constraints.
• Strong understanding of pod lifecycle and disruption management, including graceful termination, pod disruption budgets, and node draining.
• Experience enforcing configuration standards through admission control and policy-as-code, such as OPA Gatekeeper or Kyverno.
• Proficiency in Go or Python, including production infrastructure software such as Kubernetes controllers, operators, or admission webhooks.
• Strong production debugging skills and the ability to turn recurring incidents into systemic fixes.
• Experience leading technical initiatives across multiple teams, driving adoption of shared standards, and mentoring engineers.
• Experience quantifying infrastructure changes' impact on availability, latency, and cost.
• Strong written communication for standards and guidance that teams can adopt independently.
• Equivalent practical experience or a Bachelor's degree in a related field.

Culture & Benefits

• Remote-first work with flexibility within the country of employment and occasional in-person office requirements.
• 100% subsidized medical, dental, and vision coverage for employees and dependents.
• Monthly technology, health, and wellness spending stipends.
• Flexible time off and generous holiday calendars.
• Employee stock purchase plan with discounted Affirm stock.
• Inclusive interview process with accommodations for candidates with disabilities.