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Staff Software Engineer, Backend (Capacity Modeling)

Affirm· Infrastructure Platform Eng
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Remote$230k - $290kFull-timePosted 5mo ago

About the role

Staff Software Engineer, Backend focused on capacity modeling to forecast traffic and translate demand into actionable capacity plans, including development of statistical capacity models and infrastructure sizing across regions and environments.

Responsibilities

  • Set technical strategy for the team on a year-long time scale and align with critical, business-impacting projects.
  • Collaborate across product management, design, and analytics to ensure technical sustainability, risks and trade-offs are well understood and managed.
  • Act as a force-multiplier by defining and advocating technical solutions and operational processes.
  • Own the team's operations and availability with monitoring, triage rotations, playbooks, policies, testing and alerting to support on-call readiness.
  • Foster a culture of quality and ownership by setting code review and design standards and advocating them beyond the team via writing and tech talks.
  • Develop talent by providing feedback, guidance, and leading by example.

Qualifications

  • 8+ years of experience designing, developing and launching backend systems at scale using Python or Kotlin.
  • Extensive track record of developing highly available distributed systems using AWS, MySQL, Spark and Kubernetes.
  • Experience supporting scale up and down of large-scale sales events (e.g., Prime Day, Black Friday/Cyber Monday).
  • Experience tuning autoscaling, CPU/Memory, and multi-threading for compute-type workloads.
  • Experience delivering major features or components through technical and execution planning; ability to write high-quality code.
  • Thrives in ambiguity, capable of moving from low-level language idioms to architectural understanding of large systems.
  • Strong ability to gather and iterate on feedback from engineering and cross-functional peers.
  • Strong verbal and written communication skills for collaboration with a global team.
  • Equivalent practical experience or a Bachelor’s degree in a related field.

Skills

Required:Backend system design and developmentDistributed systemsCloud and infrastructure (AWS)MySQLKubernetes
Nice to have:Spark

Benefits

  • Health coverage at no cost for employees and dependents.
  • Monthly tech setup stipends and health/wellness options.
  • Flexible time off and generous holiday calendars.
  • Employee stock purchase plan (ESPP) with stock purchase at a discount.
Last updated Sep 16, 2026. Interested? Apply on the company site.

About Affirm

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