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 and maintaining statistical capacity models. This team translates demand forecasts into concrete capacity plans, covering resources like Compute, ElasticCache, DynamoDB, and AuroraDB.

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
• Experience tuning autoscaling, CPU/Memory, and multi-threading for compute-type workloads
• Experience delivering major features, system components, or deprecating 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 large system architectures
• Growth and impact trajectory demonstrating 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

• Technical leadership and strategic planning
• Collaboration and cross-functional teamwork
• Technical problem-solving and troubleshooting
• High-quality code development and maintenance
• Performance tuning and optimization
• Team building and mentoring

Benefits

• Competitive base pay ranging from $204,000 to $290,000 per year, depending on location
• Equity grade of 13
• Remote-first work environment
• Health care coverage, flexible spending wallets, time off, ESPP, and other benefits