Staff Software Engineer, Backend (Ledger Engineering)

Affirm is reinventing credit to make it more honest and friendly, enabling consumers to buy now and pay later without hidden fees or compounding interest. The Ledger Engineering team builds an audit-grade ledger platform that powers financial product innovation while maintaining the accounting controls required by a regulated industry. You'll architect and operate highly scalable, fault-tolerant systems that ensure precision and reliability across consumer transactions and institutional partnerships.

About the Role

As Staff Software Engineer on the Ledger Engineering team, you will set technical direction for your team over a year-long horizon while anchoring efforts to high-impact business priorities. You'll bridge engineering, product, and finance to ensure technical sustainability, risk management, and regulatory compliance are embedded in every decision. This role combines hands-on backend architecture with leadership responsibilities: defining operational standards, fostering quality culture, and developing your team's capabilities.

Responsibilities

• Define and execute technical strategy for your team, balancing innovation with critical business deliverables
• Collaborate across product, design, and analytics to surface technical trade-offs and ensure systems remain sustainable at scale
• Own team operations and on-call readiness by establishing monitoring, triage processes, playbooks, alerting, and testing infrastructure
• Set code review and design standards; advocate for engineering excellence across teams through documentation and technical talks
• Partner with finance teams on accounting closes, audits, and institutional reporting; support Capital Markets with forensic-level financial data reporting
• Mentor team members through feedback, guidance, and leadership by example

Requirements

• 8+ years designing, developing, and shipping backend systems at scale using Python, Kotlin, or similar languages
• Proven experience building highly available distributed systems using AWS, MySQL, Spark, Kubernetes, or equivalent technologies
• Background in financial systems, ledgering, treasury, or domains where data accuracy and system reliability are non-negotiable
• Track record of delivering major features, system components, or deprecations through clear technical planning and execution
• Ability to write high-quality, maintainable code that other engineers can easily understand and build upon

Location & Format

Remote, Canada