Senior Staff Software Engineer

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.

Affirm is looking for a Senior Staff Software Engineer to take on a key role in defining the technical direction and foster innovation across the engineering organization. You’ll work closely with engineering leaders, cross-functional teams, and stakeholders to create solutions that are scalable, reliable, and high-performing. You'll help shape best practices, guide architectural choices, and drive the successful delivery of critical initiatives. This role requires a high level of technical ability, leadership skills, strong cross-functional communication, and a creative mindset. You will be responsible for building large-scale distributed systems, and developing the overall technology strategy for a domain within our engineering org. 

Several of our engineering teams are hiring and our interview process is designed to make sure we find the best mutual team fit. See below for information on our various engineering teams:

 

Direct to Consumer: We focus on building features that help re-engage existing users, encourage repeat use of Affirm products, and provide value to existing customers within our app and marketplace. 

 

Merchant Engineering: We build products for and relationships with our merchants and our partners. In a world where sellers have many choices for payments and financing, we delight them with extraordinary product and service experiences. We make products that are a joy for developers to integrate with, making it easy for Merchants and Partners to unlock the value of being part of Affirm’s network. Software Development teams are primarily tasked with building the experiences, APIs, and other interfaces Merchants use to accept Affirm as a payment method.

 

Financial Platforms: We provide a highly consistent and fault-tolerant financial platform that empowers Affirm products. We handle automation of complex financial processes at scale, integrations with banks and payment platforms, and keep Affirm's financial records and assets in order.

 

Decisions Foundations: We power Affirm’s data-driven and customer-centric financial products. Our platforms simplify data integration, create/deploy machine learning models, and enable multivariate testing of product changes. Additionally, we build the real-time decision-making systems driving Affirm's financial products; from authentication and identity verification to fraud detection, credit underwriting, and pricing. We are focused on managing our risk exposure, growing our business, and empowering all Affirmers to make better products and experiences for our customers.

 

Infrastructure Platform: Our team is responsible for building products and systems that allow the rest of engineering to produce and deploy software that is scalable, reliable, secure, correct, consistent, and well tested.  Infrastructure Platform collaborates across the business to find simple, consistent, clean and scalable solutions to their business requirements.

 

Trust & Safety: Our team is committed to safeguarding Affirm from fraud, reputational, and compliance risks. We ensure users can securely establish their identities and interact with Affirm's products. We use data-driven decisioning to manage risk as a competitive advantage, enabling every legitimate consumer to use Affirm's products and services. We are also responsible for monitoring alerts and responding to critical issues, ensuring the smooth operation of Affirm's services.

 

What You'll Do

• Design, implement, and extend core platform services and APIs to enable new products and features to be built
• Architect and build the next version of our data-processing pipeline
• Create 3rd party developer APIs and tools
• Analyze/debug performance issues across distributed services
• Plan, design, and build our core platform software and systems to scale with an increasing number of users, features, business requirements, partners, and new engineers

What We Look For

• Passionate: Passionate about Affirm's Mission: "Deliver Honest Financial Products that improve lives"
• Technical: Solid CS fundamentals and fluency of a dynamically typed language. We primarily use Python, but members of our team have backgrounds in a wide range of technologies
• Collaborative: Enjoys cross team collaboration especially with product managers and designers
• Humble: You have the humility and self-awareness to understand and navigate the unknown 
• User Focused: Cares about the details in the user experience
• Experienced: Backgr