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 building and maintaining statistical capacity models.

Responsibilities

• Set technical strategy for the team on a year-long time scale.
• Collaborate across teams in the product development lifecycle, ensuring 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.
• Foster a culture of quality and ownership on the team 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 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 in 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.
• Experience with Python or Kotlin.
• Experience with high availability and distributed systems.
• Experience with scaling and managing large-scale sales events.
• Experience with performance tuning and optimization.
• Experience with feature delivery and system component management.
• Strong coding and debugging skills.
• Ability to communicate effectively both verbally and in writing.

Benefits

• Base Pay Grade - P
• Equity Grade - 13
• Remote-first company with options for remote work and occasional office visits.
• Competitive benefits package including health care coverage, flexible spending wallets, time off, ESPP, and more.