Staff Software Engineer, Backend (Capacity Modeling)

About the role

The Capacity Modeling team at Affirm is responsible for ensuring the platform can handle forecasted traffic, especially during peak sales events, by creating and maintaining statistical capacity models.

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 understandable and usable by others.
• Comfortable working in ambiguity and 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 to support 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.
• Proficiency in Python or Kotlin.
• Experience with distributed systems and auto-scaling.
• Ability to deliver major features and system components.
• Strong communication and collaboration skills.

Benefits

• Competitive base pay range based on location, experience, and job-related skills.
• Equity grade of 13.
• Remote-first company with flexible work arrangements.
• Comprehensive benefits package including health care coverage, flexible spending wallets, time off, ESPP, and more.