Staff Software Engineer, Backend (Capacity Modeling)

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. The Capacity Modeling team ensures Affirm can safely handle forecasted traffic—especially during peak sales events—by translating demand forecasts into concrete, testable capacity plans. They build and maintain statistical capacity models that map traffic inputs (e.g., checkout volume, app opens, batch/job activity) to resource outputs (CPU, memory, connections) and then convert those forecasts into recommended capacity settings such as pod counts, HPA ranges, and/or infrastructure sizing changes across regions and environments. The coverage of infrastructure resources includes not only Compute but also infrastructure such as ElasticCache, DynamoDB, AuroraDB, and more. What You'll Do - You will be responsible for setting technical strategy for your team on a year-long time scale, and help your team tie it together with critical, business-impacting projects. - You will collaborate across teams in the product development lifecycle by collaborating with product management, design & analytics to ensure technical sustainability, risks and trade-offs are well understood and managed. - You will act as a force-multiplier for your team through your definition and advocacy of technical solutions and operational processes. - You take ownership of your team’s operations and availability by ensuring you have the right monitoring, triage rotations, playbooks, policies, testing and alerting in place to support “keep the lights on” & on-call efforts. - You will foster a culture of quality and ownership on your team by setting code review and design standards for your team, and advocating for them beyond your team through your writing and tech talks. - You will help develop talent on your team by providing feedback and guidance, and leading by example. What We Look For - You have 8+ years of experience designing, developing and launching backend systems at scale using languages like Python or Kotlin. - You have an extensive track record of developing highly available distributed systems using technologies like AWS, MySQL, Spark and Kubernetes. - You have experience supporting scale up and down of large scale sales event such as Prime Day, Black Friday Cyber Monday, or other sales holidays - You have tuned autoscaling, CPU/Memory, and multi-threading for compute type workloads. - You have experience delivering major features, system components or deprecating existing functionality in a system through the definition of a technical and execution plan. You write high quality code that is easily understood and used by others. - You thrive in ambiguity, and are comfortable moving from low level language idioms all the way to the architecture of large systems to understand how they work. - Your growth and impact trajectory demonstrates that you have mastered gathering and iterating on feedback from your engineering and cross-functional peers. - You have strong verbal and written communication skills that support effective collaboration with our global engineering team. - This position requires either equivalent practical experience or a Bachelor’s degree in a related field. Base Pay Grade - P Equity Grade - 13 Employees new to Affirm typically come in at the start of the pay range. Affirm focuses on providing a simple and transparent pay structure which is based on a variety of factors, including location, experience and job-related skills. Base pay is part of a total compensation package that may include equity rewards, monthly stipends for health, wellness and tech spending, and benefits (including 100% subsidized medical coverage, dental and vision for you and your dependents.) USA base pay range (CA, WA, NY, NJ, CT) per year: 230,000 - 290,000 USA base pay range (all other U.S. states) per year: 204,000 - 264,000 #LI-Remote Affirm is proud to be a remote-first company! The majority of our roles are remote and you can work almost anywhere within the country of employment. Affirmers in proximal roles have the flexibility to work remotely, but will occasionally be required to work out of their assigned Affirm office. A limited number of roles remain office-based due to the nature of their job responsibilities. We’re extremely proud to offer competitive benefits that are anchored to our core value of people come first. Some key highlights of our benefits package include: - Health care coverage - Affirm covers all premiums for all levels of coverage for you and your dependents - Flexible Spending Wallets - generous stipends for spending on Technology, Food, various Lifestyle needs, and family forming expenses - Time off - competitive vacation and holiday schedules allowing you to take time off to rest and recharge - ESPP - An employee stock purchase plan enabling y

8+ years of experience designing, developing and launching backend systems at scale using languages like Python or Kotlin. Extensive track record of developing highly available distributed systems using technologies like AWS, MySQL, Spark and Kubernetes. Experience supporting scale up and down of large scale sales events (e.g., Prime Day, Black Friday, Cyber Monday). Tuned autoscaling, CPU/Memory, and multi-threading for compute-type workloads. Experience delivering major features or deprecating existing functionality through a technical and execution plan. Ability to thrive in ambiguity, understanding both low-level language idioms and large system architectures. Demonstrated growth and impact trajectory with feedback from engineering and cross-functional peers. Strong verbal and written communication skills for collaboration with global engineering teams. Requires either equivalent practical experience or a Bachelor’s degree in a related field.

Set technical strategy for the team on a year-long time scale and align it with critical, business-impacting projects. Collaborate across product management, design, and analytics to ensure technical sustainability, risk awareness, and trade-offs. Act as a force-multiplier by defining and advocating technical solutions and operational processes. Own team operations and availability with monitoring, triage rotations, playbooks, policies, testing, and alerting to support on-call efforts. Foster a culture of quality and ownership by establishing code review and design standards and advocating for them beyond the team. Develop talent by providing feedback and guidance and leading by example.