Senior Staff Software Engineer, Backend (Compute Platform)

At Affirm, we exist for the moments that matter—giving people a clear, predictable way to pay over time, with no hidden fees, no surprises, and no tradeoffs on what matters most. Affirm's engineering team is building a large-scale, highly-available, and global infrastructure that is shared across multiple financial products. The Compute Platform team owns the EKS foundation that Affirm's products run on, from cluster provisioning and lifecycle through the safety standards that keep thousands of workloads reliable at scale. Affirm operates 90+ EKS clusters across environments and regions. Affirm is a remote-first company. Most roles can be done from almost anywhere within the country of employment.

Responsibilities

Architect and evolve Affirm's EKS platform, driving strategy across cluster lifecycle, node management, and shared cluster components; Lead the technical direction for cluster provisioning, upgrades, and teardown through standardized IaC (Terraform, Spacelift) and self-service workflows; Own the reliability of core shared components across the fleet (Karpenter, CoreDNS, VPC CNI, Kube Proxy, Metrics Server, etc) and the CI/CD pipeline that ships them; Define and enforce EKS workload safety standards covering resource configuration, workload isolation and blast radius, disruption tolerance (PDBs), and Karpenter consolidation strategies; Build the enforcement and automation path that moves each standard from research and onboarding through broad adoption to policy-enforced defaults; Establish observability, baseline audits, and reporting to identify hot spots and measure risk mitigation; Partner with cluster-user teams to understand workload needs and shape the platform accordingly; Drive cost and capacity strategy across node scaling, bin packing, and EC2 instance selection; Mentor engineers across the Compute Platform teams and set the bar for operational excellence; Participate in the on-call rotation, triage and catalogue runtime K8s issues, and collaborate with SRE on production incidents

Requirements

10+ years in software or infrastructure engineering with proven delivery of complex platform solutions; 6+ years hands-on operating production Kubernetes at scale, ideally EKS on AWS; Deep EKS and Kubernetes internals expertise, including cluster upgrades, node lifecycle, scheduling, and autoscaling (Karpenter, Cluster Autoscaler); Demonstrated experience automating Kubernetes operations at fleet scale; Strong grasp of workload reliability patterns: resource tuning, probes, PDBs, topology and isolation constraints; Experience designing and enforcing platform standards through policy (admission control, OPA/Gatekeeper or equivalent); Infrastructure as Code fluency with Terraform and GitOps or pipeline-driven delivery (ArgoCD, kube-applier, or similar); Observability instincts: defining SLOs, building metrics, logs, and alerting coverage, and running data-driven baseline audits; Cross-functional collaboration skills with platform, product, SRE, and capacity teams; Demonstrated mentorship and technical leadership across teams; Drive to track emerging Kubernetes community best practices; Strong cloud-native architecture experience on AWS (EC2, VPC, IAM, EKS); Expert-level proficiency in Go or Python and a proven track record building production-grade Kubernetes controllers, operators, and platform tooling; Track record designing and enforcing standards across many teams without becoming a bottleneck; Exceptional problem-solving and systems-thinking skills; Demonstrated leadership and cross-functional influence; Excellent communication skills

Nice to have

Experience with Infrastructure-as-Code tooling Spacelift

Benefits

100% subsidized medical coverage for employees and dependents; Dental and vision coverage for employees and dependents; Equity rewards; Monthly stipends for health, wellness and tech spending; Flexible time off and generous holiday calendar; Employee stock purchase plan (ESPP) with discount