Staff Software Engineer, Affirm Bank

Affirm is building its own bank and seeking a Staff Software Engineer to serve as a technical anchor for the engineering team that operates it. In this senior individual-contributor role, you'll set technical direction across the bank's core systems, own the highest-stakes infrastructure and integration challenges, and shape the architecture that supports real customers under a real bank charter.

About the Role

This is a rare opportunity to architect and operate a new banking business from its foundation — a startup-scale build within an established company. You'll work with a deliberately small, AI-native team that owns vendor-integrated banking infrastructure, the data platform, operational tooling, and the critical Bank ↔ Affirm Inc integration boundary. As a Staff engineer, you'll set technical standards and strategy that the entire team builds against, with direct exposure to senior bank and Affirm leadership. Your decisions carry significant weight: every system you ship serves real customers, and the patterns you establish determine what the bank becomes.

Responsibilities

• Set medium-to-long-term technical strategy for the bank's core systems, including cloud infrastructure, data platform, core banking configuration, CI/CD, networking, and the Bank ↔ Affirm Inc integration boundary. Make architectural decisions that guide the team's work.
• Personally design, build, integrate, and operate the most ambiguous and highest-stakes components of the stack. Own incident response and turn ill-defined problems into well-scoped systems with clear failure domains, monitoring, and runbooks.
• Establish and maintain technical standards through code review, design review, and documentation that meets regulatory scrutiny. Create patterns and processes that enable a small team to deliver disproportionate impact.
• Lead vendor selection, evaluation, and ongoing partnership management for banking infrastructure and critical third-party systems.
• Leverage AI tools and agentic workflows as load-bearing capabilities for engineering velocity — in code generation, design review, runbook creation, and operations — and push the team's capabilities in this area.

Requirements

• Proven experience as a Staff or Principal engineer, or equivalent depth of technical leadership and architectural ownership.
• Deep expertise in at least two of: distributed systems, data platforms, cloud infrastructure, banking/fintech systems, or regulatory compliance engineering.
• Demonstrated ability to own ambiguous, high-stakes problems end-to-end and operate them reliably in production.
• Strong generalist foundation with the ability to go deep where risk is highest.
• Experience working with vendor integrations and managing third-party dependencies in mission-critical systems.
• Comfort with AI-native development workflows and eagerness to push boundaries on AI-leveraged engineering.

Benefits

• Remote position based in the US.
• Opportunity to shape banking infrastructure and technical strategy at the ground level.
• Work directly with senior leadership across Affirm and the bank.
• Competitive compensation and equity aligned with staff-level roles at growth-stage fintech companies.