Senior Staff Software Engineer, Backend (Compute Platform)

Location: Remote US; most roles can be performed almost anywhere within the country of employment. New hires attend an in-person onboarding experience.

Base pay per year: $265,000–$325,000 in CA, WA, NY, NJ, and CT; $236,000–$296,000 in all other U.S. states.

Company

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

What you will do

• Architect and evolve the EKS platform across cluster lifecycle, node management, shared components, and 90+ clusters.
• Lead standardized cluster provisioning, upgrades, teardown, and self-service workflows using Terraform, Spacelift, and delivery pipelines.
• Own the reliability and consistent release of shared components including Karpenter, CoreDNS, VPC CNI, Kube Proxy, and Metrics Server.
• Define and automate workload safety standards covering resource configuration, isolation, blast radius, disruption tolerance, and autoscaling.
• Build observability, baseline audits, reporting, cost and capacity strategies, and policy-enforcement paths for platform standards.
• Partner with product, infrastructure, traffic, cost and capacity, SRE, and workload teams; mentor engineers and participate in on-call and production incident response.

Requirements

• Deep expertise in EKS and Kubernetes internals, including upgrades, node lifecycle, scheduling, and autoscaling with Karpenter or Cluster Autoscaler.
• Experience automating Kubernetes operations at fleet scale, including provisioning, upgrades, node lifecycle, self-healing remediation, policy-driven enforcement, and auditable self-service workflows.
• Strong knowledge of workload reliability patterns, including resource tuning, probes, PDBs, topology, and isolation constraints.
• Experience designing and enforcing platform standards through admission control, OPA/Gatekeeper, or equivalent automated frameworks.
• Infrastructure-as-Code fluency with Terraform and GitOps or pipeline-driven delivery models; experience with Spacelift, ArgoCD, kube-applier, or similar is relevant.
• Experience defining SLOs, building metrics, logs, alerting coverage, and data-driven baseline audits.
• 10+ years in software or infrastructure engineering, including 6+ years operating production Kubernetes at scale, ideally EKS on AWS.
• Strong AWS cloud-native architecture experience with EC2, VPC, IAM, and EKS.
• Expert-level Go or Python proficiency and experience building production-grade Kubernetes controllers, operators, and platform tooling.
• Demonstrated technical leadership, mentorship, cross-functional influence, systems thinking, and delivery of complex platform solutions.
• Equivalent practical experience or a Bachelor’s degree in a related field.

Culture & Benefits

• Remote-first work with flexibility within the country of employment; some roles may occasionally require office work.
• Thorough technical design reviews, operational excellence, and capable incident response are emphasized across engineering.
• 100% subsidized medical coverage for employees and dependents, plus dental and vision coverage.
• Monthly technology, health, and wellness spending stipends.
• Flexible time off, generous holiday calendars, and an employee stock purchase plan.