Staff Software Engineer, Backend (Ledger Engineering)

About the role

The Ledger Engineering team at Affirm enables rapid financial product innovation by providing an audit-grade ledger platform that ties ambitious company growth to a highly regulated industry's real-world accounting controls. We build robust, fault-tolerant, highly scalable systems to ensure on-time and precisely accurate financial interactions with consumers and institutional finance partners. The team supports everything from closing monthly books to annual audits, bridging the technical gap between data, strategy, and accounting detail required for a publicly-traded company. Outside of accounting, we partner with the Capital Markets team to provide forensic-level reporting for investors.

Responsibilities

• Set technical strategy for your team on a year-long time scale and align it with business-impacting projects.
• Collaborate with product management, design, and analytics throughout the product development lifecycle to ensure technical sustainability, risk management, and trade-off evaluation.
• Act as a force-multiplier for your team by defining and advocating for technical solutions and operational processes.
• Own your team’s operations and availability by implementing monitoring, triage rotations, playbooks, policies, testing, and alerting to support on-call efforts.
• Foster a culture of quality and ownership by setting code review and design standards, and advocating for them through writing and tech talks.
• Develop talent on your team by providing feedback, guidance, and leading by example.

Requirements

• 8+ years of experience designing, developing, and launching backend systems at scale using languages like Python or Kotlin.
• Extensive track record of developing highly available distributed systems using technologies like AWS, MySQL, Spark, and Kubernetes.
• Experience in financial systems, ledgering, treasury, or adjacent domains where data accuracy and system reliability are critical.
• Experience delivering major features, system components, or deprecating existing functionality through well-defined technical and execution plans.
• Ability to write high-quality code that is easily understood and used by others.
• Comfort navigating ambiguity and understanding systems from low-level language idioms to large-scale architecture.
• Demonstrated ability to gather and iterate on feedback from engineering and cross-functional peers.
• Strong verbal and written communication skills for effective collaboration with a global engineering team.
• Bachelor’s degree in a related field or equivalent practical experience.

Pay

Base pay is part of a total compensation package that may include equity rewards, monthly stipends for health, wellness, and tech spending, and benefits (including 100% subsidized medical coverage, dental, and vision for you and your dependents). Employees new to Affirm typically start at the beginning of the pay range.

• USA base pay range (CA, WA, NY, NJ, CT) per year: $230,000 - $290,000
• USA base pay range (all other U.S. states) per year: $204,000 - $264,000

Schedule

Affirm is a remote-first company. The majority of roles are remote, allowing you to work almost anywhere within the country of employment. Affirmers in proximal roles have the flexibility to work remotely but may occasionally be required to work from their assigned Affirm office. A limited number of roles remain office-based due to job responsibilities.

Benefits

• Health care coverage: Affirm covers all premiums for all levels of coverage for you and your dependents.
• Flexible Spending Wallets: Generous stipends for spending on technology, food, lifestyle needs, and family-forming expenses.
• Time off: Competitive vacation and holiday schedules to rest and recharge.
• Employee Stock Purchase Plan (ESPP): Ability to buy shares of Affirm at a discount.