Senior Software Engineer, Card Loan Platform

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 Card Loan Platform team builds the high-throughput decision engine at the heart of Affirm’s card products. Unlike traditional cards, every pay-later transaction is backed by its own unique loan, and our system is the "invisible piping" that makes this complex model work at scale. Every swipe triggers our platform to solve a hard problem in milliseconds: matching messy, fragmented payment network data to the correct loan to drive real-time approvals, origination, and refunds.

As Affirm experiences explosive growth, our team's contributions are a key enabler. This isn't just another backend role; you'll be building the "financial brain" for our flagship card products, with your work on the critical path for every single swipe. We're tackling a unique, high-stakes distributed systems challenge that demands exceptional correctness and massive scale. You will partner closely with product, data science, and engineering teams to design and build the future of our industry-leading money movement platform.

If you are passionate about making foundational design decisions and building a beloved, lasting financial brand—come join us. It’s going to be an amazing ride!

What You'll Do

• You will be responsible for owning and delivering quarterly goals for your team, leading engineers on your team through ambiguity to solve open-ended problems, and ensuring that everyone is supported throughout delivery.
• You will support your peers and stakeholders in the product development lifecycle by collaborating with product management, design & analytics by participating in ideation, articulating technical constraints, and partnering on decisions that properly consider risks and trade-offs.
• You will proactively identify project, process, technology or business issues, advocate for them, and lead in solving them.
• You will support the operations and availability of your team’s artifacts by creating and monitoring metrics, escalating when needed, and supporting “keep the lights on” & on-call efforts.
• You will foster a culture of quality and ownership on your team by setting or improving 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 4+ years of experience designing, developing and launching backend systems at scale using languages like Python or Kotlin.
• You have a track record of developing highly available distributed systems using technologies like AWS, MySQL and Kubernetes.
• You have experience defining a technical plan for the delivery of a significant feature or system component with an elegant, simple and extensible design. You write high quality code that is easily understood and used by others.
• You are proficient at making significant changes in a large code base, and have developed a suite of tools and practices that enable you and your team to do so safely.
• Your experience demonstrates that you take ownership of your growth, proactively seeking feedback from your team, your manager, and your stakeholders.
• 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.

Pay Grade - N
Equity Grade - 8

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: $190,000-240,000
USA base pay range (all other U.S. states) per year: $169,000-219,000

#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