Staff Software Engineer, Backend (Growth Platform)

<div class="content-intro"><p>Affirm is reinventing credit to make it more honest and friendly, giving consumers the flexibility to buy now and pay later without any hidden fees or compounding interest.</p></div><p>The Growth Platform team builds shared backend platforms that power incentives, experimentation, personalization, and data-driven decisioning across Affirm’s consumer and merchant experiences, directly influencing customer acquisition, engagement, and retention.</p> <h3>What you’ll do</h3> <ul> <li> <p>You will be responsible for setting technical strategy for your team on a year-long time scale, owning backend platforms that power incentives and growth initiatives across Affirm.</p> </li> <li> <p>You will collaborate with product management, analytics, and partner teams to shape technical direction for incentive systems, ensuring long-term sustainability, correctness, and clear trade-offs that inform roadmap decisions.</p> </li> <li> <p>You will act as a force-multiplier by defining platform abstractions, APIs, and architectural patterns that enable product teams to safely launch, experiment with, and evolve incentive-based experiences.</p> </li> <li> <p>You take ownership of your team’s operations and availability by ensuring robust monitoring, alerting, playbooks, and on-call practices are in place for business-critical incentive and growth systems. </p> </li> <li> <p>You will foster a culture of quality and ownership by setting clear design and code review standards, and advocating for them beyond your immediate team through written proposals and technical discussions.</p> </li> <li> <p>You will help develop talent on your team by providing actionable feedback, technical guidance, and leadership on complex, high-impact systems.<br> </p> </li> </ul> <h3>What we look for</h3> <ul> <li> <p>You have 8+ years of experience designing, developing, and launching backend systems at scale using languages like Python or Kotlin.</p> </li> <li> <p>You have an extensive track record of developing highly available distributed systems using technologies such as AWS, MySQL, Spark, and Kubernetes.</p> </li> <li> <p>You have experience building or evolving shared backend platforms that support Rewards, Loyalty, Incentives, Experimentation, or other growth-critical workflows used by multiple product teams.</p> </li> <li> <p>You have led complex technical initiatives that required cross-team alignment, long-term architectural thinking, and influence without direct authority.</p> </li> <li> <p>You have experience delivering major features, system components, or deprecating existing functionality through the definition and execution of a clear technical plan. You write high quality code that is easily understood and used by others.</p> </li> <li> <p>You thrive in ambiguity, and are comfortable moving from low-level language idioms to the architecture of large-scale systems to understand how they work end to end.</p> </li> <li> <p>Your growth and impact trajectory demonstrates that you have mastered gathering, incorporating, and iterating on feedback from engineering and cross-functional peers.</p> </li> <li> <p>You have strong verbal and written communication skills that support effective collaboration with a global engineering organization.</p> </li> <li> <p>This position requires either equivalent practical experience or a Bachelor’s degree in a related field.<br> </p> </li> </ul> <div> <p data-pm-slice="1 1 []">Pay Grade - P&l ... (truncated, view full listing at source)