Staff Software Engineer, Affirm Bank

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. About the Role Affirm is building its own bank — and this role is one of the most senior individual-contributor seats on the engineering team that runs it. We're looking for a Staff Software Engineer to be a technical anchor for a deliberately small, AI-native team that owns the systems behind Affirm's bank: vendor-integrated banking infrastructure, the data platform, and the operational tooling that holds it all together. You'll set technical direction across that surface area, own the hardest problems on the team — including the Bank ↔ Affirm Inc integration boundary — and operate with direct exposure to senior bank and Affirm leadership. This is a rare opportunity to shape a new business from its very first systems — a startup-like build inside an established company — at a level of ownership that goes beyond delivering your own projects. As a Staff engineer here you set the bar: the architecture, the standards, and the technical strategy that the rest of the team builds against. The team is small and AI-native, the surface area is broad, and the decisions you make carry far — every system you ship serves real customers under a real bank charter, and the patterns you establish determine what the bank becomes. What You'll Do - Set technical direction across the bank's systems. Own the medium-to-long-term technical strategy for the bank's core surfaces — cloud infrastructure, data platform, core banking configuration, CI/CD, networking, and the Bank ↔ Affirm Inc integration — and make the architecture calls the rest of the team builds against. Generalist breadth is expected; you go deep where the risk is highest. - Own the hardest problems end-to-end. Personally design, build, integrate, and operate the most ambiguous and highest-stakes pieces of the stack, and own incident response for them. You take the problems no one else can fully scope and turn them into well-defined systems with clear failure domains, monitoring, and runbooks. - Be the force multiplier on a small team. Set and hold the bar for code review, design review, and examiner-readable documentation. Establish the patterns and standards that let a deliberately small team punch far above its size, and level up every engineer who joins after you. - Ship AI-first, and push the frontier of it. Treat AI tools and agentic workflows as a load-bearing capability for code, design review, runbook generation, and operations — and actively push yourself and the team on what an AI-leveraged engineering function can deliver in place of additional headcount. - Lead vendor selection and ownership. Drive evaluation, integration, and ongoing oversight of the bank's third-party platforms across the core, data, identity, observability, and card-processing stacks. Carry the bank's most critical vendor relationships end-to-end: integration, operations, escalation, and audit. - Define the integration boundary with Affirm Inc. Set the domain edges, data flows, and integration patterns between the bank and Affirm Inc so the bank's products work seamlessly inside the Affirm ecosystem while preserving the legal and regulatory separation the charter requires. Drive this across Affirm Inc engineering teams whose systems integrate with the bank's. - Build for examiners. Partner with Legal, Compliance, Risk, BSA/AML, Finance, and Internal Audit so compliance is a property of the product from day one. The systems you design are the artifacts FDIC and state examiners will inspect — design and document them to a standard that holds up under examination and audit review. - Own the operational posture of the bank's systems. Set the reliability, observability, alerting, runbook, incident-response, and disaster-recovery practices that keep the bank standalone-operable and audit-ready, while keeping the operational footprint intentionally small. - Influence up and across the organization. Communicate technical strategy, tradeoffs, and constraints with clarity to bank executives, the Bank Board, Compliance, Risk — and to engineers outside the bank across the broader Affirm org. The relationships you build beyond the team shape how cleanly the integration boundary works. - Help grow the team and the bar. As engineers join, they inherit a function whose architecture, practices, and standards you helped set. Mentor peers, provide high-signal feedback, contribute to hiring, and lead by example. What We Look For - 8+ years of software engineering experience, with staff-level, hands-on builder credentials and a track record of owning ambiguous, high-stakes systems end-to-end through launch and operations - Comfortable owning ambiguity at the largest scale on the team — you move fast, make the tough prioritization calls, take ownership before being asked, and balance speed with the engineering judgment

8+ years of software engineering experience, with staff-level, hands-on builder credentials and a track record of owning ambiguous, high-stakes systems end-to-end through launch and operations.

Set technical direction across the bank's systems, own medium-to-long-term technical strategy for core surfaces (cloud infrastructure, data platform, core banking configuration, CI/CD, networking, and Bank ↔ Affirm Inc integration), and make architecture calls the team builds against. Design, build, integrate, and operate the most ambiguous and highest-stakes pieces of the stack, and own incident response. Establish patterns, standards, and documentation to enable a small team to perform at scale. Ship AI-first capabilities and push the frontier of AI-enabled engineering. Lead vendor selection and ongoing oversight of third-party platforms across core, data, identity, observability, and card-processing stacks. Define integration boundaries with Affirm Inc, ensuring seamless product work within regulatory separation. Collaborate with Legal, Compliance, Risk, and Audit to build compliance into product design. Own operational posture including reliability, observability, alerting, runbooks, incident response, and disaster recovery. Communicate technical strategy and tradeoffs with executives and engineers, and contribute to hiring and mentoring.