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 translate demand forecasts into actionable 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

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 understood and used by others
• Comfortable moving from low-level language idioms to 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 for effective collaboration with the global engineering team

Qualifications

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

Skills

• Experience with AWS, MySQL, Spark, and Kubernetes
• Autoscaling, CPU/Memory, and multi-threading expertise
• Experience with major feature delivery and system component deprecation
• High-quality code writing and understanding
• Ability to move from low-level language idioms to large system architectures
• Feedback gathering and iteration skills
• Effective communication skills

Benefits

• Base Pay Range: $204,000 - $264,000 per year (USA)
• Equity Grade: 13
• Remote-first company
• Competitive benefits package including health care coverage, flexible spending wallets, time off, ESPP, and more