Staff Software Engineer (Continuous Integration)

Affirm is reinventing credit to make it more honest and friendly, giving consumers the flexibility to buy now and pay later without any hidden fees or compounding interest.

We are seeking a seasoned Staff Engineer to help drive our Continuous Integration (CI) team. This role is critical in ensuring the reliability, scalability, and efficiency of our development pipelines, enabling engineers across the company to ship high-quality software quickly and confidently. The Staff Engineer will help drive the design, implementation, and optimization of systems that support automated testing, build orchestration, and deployment.

What you’ll do

• Systems & Operations
  
  
• Own the design, scalability, and reliability of build and pipelines across multiple services and platforms.
• Ensure fast, reliable feedback cycles for developers by optimizing build times, test coverage, and reporting.
• Implement monitoring, alerting, and incident response processes for CI systems to minimize downtime.
  
  
  
• Collaboration & Enablement
  
  
• Work closely with across engineering to ensure smooth integrations and deployment workflows.
• Identify developer pain points and lead initiatives to improve productivity through tooling, automation, and best practices.
• Evangelize CI/CD practices across the organization to raise engineering efficiency standards.
  
  
• Leadership & Strategy
  
  
• Contribute to and help drive the vision for continuous integration and developer productivity infrastructure.
• Lead and mentor other CI engineers, fostering a culture of ownership, collaboration, and technical excellence.
• Partner with engineering leadership to align CI systems with broader product and platform goals.

What we look for

• Proven experience driving and leading engineering efforts in CI, build systems, or developer productivity domains.
• Strong background in modern build systems (e.g. GitHub, Buildkite, Artifactory, Bazel).
• Familiarity with cloud-native environments (AWS, Kubernetes) and infrastructure-as-code practices.
• Solid programming background (Python, Kotlin, Java, or similar) and ability to guide technical decision-making.
• Excellent problem-solving skills, with the ability to balance long-term vision with short-term impact.
• This position requires either equivalent practical experience or a Bachelor’s degree in a related field
• Proficiency with managing build systems and frameworks for large monorepos. Preferred experience in Bazel.
• Active contributor to open source projects or previous experience with large-scale software development at a leading tech company is a plus.

About You:

• You are driven by a passion for CI/CD and possess a de