Staff Software Engineer, Backend (Capacity Modeling)

Role Description

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

• Set technical strategy for your team on a year-long time scale and help tie it together with critical, business-impacting projects.
• Collaborate across teams in the product development lifecycle with product management, design & analytics to ensure technical sustainability, risks, and trade-offs are well understood and managed.
• Act as a force-multiplier for your team through the definition and advocacy of technical solutions and operational processes.
• Take ownership of your team’s operations and availability by ensuring the right monitoring, triage rotations, playbooks, policies, testing, and alerting are in place to support “keep the lights on” & on-call efforts.
• Foster a culture of quality and ownership on your team by setting code review and design standards and advocating for them beyond your team through writing and tech talks.
• Help develop talent on your team by providing feedback and guidance, and leading by example.

Qualifications

• 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 such as Prime Day, Black Friday Cyber Monday, or other sales holidays.
• Tuned autoscaling, CPU/Memory, and multi-threading for compute type workloads.
• Experience delivering major features, system components, or deprecating existing functionality in a system through the definition of a technical and execution plan.
• Write high quality code that is easily understood and used by others.
• Thrive in ambiguity, comfortable moving from low level language idioms to the architecture of large systems.
• Growth and impact trajectory demonstrates mastery in gathering and iterating on feedback from engineering and cross-functional peers.
• Strong verbal and written communication skills that support effective collaboration with a global engineering team.

Requirements

• Pay Grade - P
• Equity Grade - 7
• Base pay range per year: $178,000 - $228,000
• Affirm focuses on providing a simple and transparent pay structure based on location, experience, and job-related skills.

Benefits

• 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 you to buy shares of Affirm at a discount.

Company Description

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 believe it’s on us to provide an inclusive interview experience for all, including people with disabilities. We are happy to provide reasonable accommodations to candidates in need of individualized support during the hiring process.

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