Staff Software Engineer, Backend (Capacity Modeling)

About the role

The Capacity Modeling team at Affirm ensures the company can handle forecasted traffic, especially during peak sales events, by creating statistical capacity models that predict resource usage and recommend appropriate capacity settings.

Responsibilities

• Set technical strategy for the team on a year-long scale
• Collaborate with product management, design, and analytics to ensure technical sustainability and manage risks and trade-offs
• Act as a force-multiplier for the team by defining and advocating for technical solutions and operational processes
• Take ownership of team operations and availability by ensuring monitoring, triage rotations, playbooks, policies, testing, and alerting are in place
• Foster a culture of quality and ownership by setting code review and design standards and advocating for them beyond the team
• Help develop talent on the team by providing feedback and guidance and leading by example

Requirements

• 8+ years of experience designing, developing, and launching backend systems at scale using Python or Kotlin
• Extensive track record of developing highly available distributed systems using AWS, MySQL, Spark, and Kubernetes
• Experience supporting scale up and down of large-scale sales events such as Prime Day, Black Friday, Cyber Monday, or other sales holidays
• Tuned autoscaling, CPU/Memory, and multi-threading for compute-type workloads
• Delivered major features, system components, or deprecated existing functionality through a defined technical and execution plan
• Write high-quality code that is easily understandable and usable by others
• Comfortable working in ambiguity and understanding both low-level language idioms and the architecture of large systems
• Growth and impact trajectory demonstrates mastery of gathering and iterating on feedback from engineering and cross-functional peers
• Strong verbal and written communication skills to support effective collaboration with the global engineering team

Qualifications

• Equivalent practical experience or a Bachelor’s degree in a related field

Benefits

Base Pay Grade - P Equity Grade - 13 Employees new to Affirm typically come in at the start of the pay range. Affirm focuses on providing a simple and transparent pay structure based on a variety of factors, including location, experience, and job-related skills. 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: $230,000 - $290,000 USA base pay range (all other U.S. states) per year: $204,000 - $264,000

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. Affirmers in proximal roles have the flexibility to work remotely, but will occasionally be required to work out of their assigned Affirm office. A limited number of roles remain office-based due to the nature of their job responsibilities.

Benefits We’re extremely proud to offer competitive benefits that are anchored to our core value of people come first. Some key highlights of our benefits package include:

• 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 family forming expenses
• Time off - competitive vacation and holiday schedules allowing you to take time off to rest and recharge
• ESPP - An employee stock purchase plan enabling you to buy shares of Affirm at a discount

We believe It’s On Us to provide an inclusive interview experience for all, including people with disabilities. We are happy to provide reasonable accommodations to candidates in need of individualized support during the hiring process.