Staff Software Engineer, Backend (Ledger Engineering)

Affirm is reinventing credit to make it more honest and friendly, giving consumers the flexibility to buy now and pay later without hidden fees or compounding interest. The Ledger Engineering team builds an audit-grade ledger platform that enables rapid financial product innovation while maintaining the accounting controls required by a regulated financial services business. This Staff Software Engineer role offers the opportunity to shape technical strategy for a team responsible for systems that power everything from monthly financial closes to audits for a publicly-traded company.

About the Role

As a Staff Software Engineer on Ledger Engineering, you'll set technical direction for your team on a yearly roadmap while ensuring that strategy aligns with high-impact business initiatives. You'll bridge the gap between product development, data strategy, and the precise accounting controls required to operate in a regulated financial environment. Your work directly supports both consumer-facing financial products and institutional finance partnerships, including capital markets reporting.

Responsibilities

• Define and communicate technical strategy for your team across a 12-month planning horizon, connecting it to business-critical projects
• Collaborate with product, design, and analytics teams to surface and manage technical risks, trade-offs, and sustainability concerns
• Establish operational excellence by designing monitoring, triage processes, playbooks, testing strategies, and alerting systems to support on-call operations
• Set code review standards and design practices for your team; advocate for these standards across the organization through documentation and technical talks
• Drive team development through feedback, mentorship, and modeling ownership and quality
• Own delivery of major features, system components, and deprecations by defining technical and execution plans

Requirements

• 8+ years designing, developing, and shipping backend systems at scale using Python, Kotlin, or similar languages
• Demonstrated expertise building highly available distributed systems with AWS, MySQL, Spark, Kubernetes, or comparable technologies
• Experience in financial systems, ledgering, treasury, or related domains where data accuracy and system reliability are non-negotiable
• Track record of delivering major features or system components; ability to write code that is easily understood and maintained by others
• Comfortable working in a remote US environment