Staff Software Engineer, Backend (Order Platform)

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. As a Staff Software Engineer on the Order Platform team, you'll architect and own the systems powering post-checkout operations—orders, captures, refunds, and settlement—while setting technical strategy for reliable, scalable transactions across our merchant and consumer base.

About the Role

This is a high-leverage staff-level position within Financial Platforms. You'll lead a small, senior engineering team consolidating Affirm's internal post-checkout platform: defining domain boundaries, migrating existing merchants, and enabling future product launches. You'll set multi-year technical direction, mentor strong engineers, and own architectural decisions with lasting business impact.

Responsibilities

• Set technical strategy on a year-long timeline and align your team around critical, business-impacting projects
• Collaborate across product, design, and analytics to ensure technical sustainability and manage risks and trade-offs
• Act as a force-multiplier by defining and advocating for technical solutions and operational processes
• Own team operations and availability by establishing monitoring, triage rotations, runbooks, policies, testing, and alerting for on-call support
• Foster a culture of quality and ownership through code review standards, design practices, and technical leadership beyond your team
• Develop team talent through feedback, guidance, and mentorship by example

Requirements

• 8+ years designing, developing, and launching backend systems at scale using Python, Kotlin, or similar languages
• Extensive experience building highly available distributed systems with AWS, MySQL, Spark, Kubernetes, or equivalent technologies
• Strong analytical ability in designing services with clear API boundaries, high reliability, and thoughtful handling of consistency, idempotency, and failure modes
• Demonstrated experience in payments, commerce, ledger systems, or other financially-sensitive domains
• Track record delivering major features, system components, or deprecating functionality through technical planning and execution
• Strong writing and communication skills

Details

• Location: Remote (US)