Staff Software Engineer, Backend (Order Platform)

About the Role

As a Staff Software Engineer on the Order Platform team at Affirm, you'll shape the systems that power every Affirm purchase after checkout — orders, captures, refunds, and settlement. You'll drive the technical strategy to enable reliable transactions at scale for our merchants and consumers, ensuring high availability and unlocking future product needs.

Responsibilities

• Set technical strategy for your team on a year-long time scale, aligning it with critical, business-impacting projects.
• Collaborate across teams in the product development lifecycle with product management, design, and analytics to ensure technical sustainability, risks, and trade-offs are well understood and managed.
• Act as a force-multiplier 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.

Qualifications

• 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.
• Analytical and discerning approach to designing services with clear API boundaries, strong reliability, and thoughtful handling of consistency, idempotency, and failure modes, ideally in a payments, commerce, ledger, or financially-sensitive domain.
• Experience delivering major features, system components, or deprecating existing functionality through technical and execution planning.
• Ability to write high-quality, easily understandable code.
• Comfortable with ambiguity and capable of understanding low-level language idioms and large system architectures.
• Demonstrated growth and impact trajectory, mastering 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

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

Benefits

• Health coverage at no cost: 100% of premiums for employees and their dependents.
• Monthly stipends for tech setup and health/wellness options.
• Flexible time off and generous holiday calendars.
• Employee stock purchase plan (ESPP) with discounted Affirm stock.

Remote-first with flexibility. Most roles can be done from almost anywhere within the country of employment. Some positions may require occasional in-person work or be office-based. All new hires attend an in-person onboarding experience.