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 time scale
• Collaborate with product management, design & analytics to ensure technical sustainability, risks, and trade-offs are well understood and managed
• Act as a force-multiplier for the team through the definition and advocacy of technical solutions and operational processes
• Take ownership of the team’s operations and availability by ensuring the right monitoring, triage rotations, playbooks, policies, testing, and alerting are in place to support “keep the lights on” and on-call efforts
• Foster a culture of quality and ownership on the team by setting code review and design standards for the team and advocating for them beyond the team through writing and tech talks
• 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 languages like Python or Kotlin
• An extensive track record of developing highly available distributed systems using technologies like 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 in a system through the definition of a technical and execution plan
• Write high-quality code that is easily understood and used by others
• Thrive in ambiguity and are comfortable moving from low-level language idioms to the architecture of large systems to understand how they work
• 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

• Technical leadership and strategic planning
• Collaboration and teamwork
• Problem-solving and decision-making
• Technical expertise in backend systems, distributed systems, and cloud technologies

Benefits

• Competitive base pay ranging from $204,000 to $290,000 per year
• Equity grade of 13
• Remote-first work environment
• Health care coverage
• Flexible spending wallets
• Time off
• Employee Stock Purchase Plan (ESPP)