Backend Software Engineer (Merchant Advocacy)

Role overview

Join Affirm as a Backend Software Engineer on the Merchant & Partner Lifecycle (M&PL) team. You’ll serve as a technical leader building a new lifecycle-orchestrator service, improving reliability/availability, and modernizing parts of the backend codebase.

Key missions

• Build and lead the lifecycle-orchestrator service, delivering near-term availability improvements and modernizing older components.
• Design and expand the platform backbone to scale to hundreds of thousands of merchants, coordinating scope across teams for cross-team initiatives.
• Execute technical strategy for broad/complex requirements, using agentic development tools to automate parts of the development process.

Responsibilities

• Lead architecture and implementation efforts across backend services.
• Align work with other teams to support cross-team projects.
• Produce and communicate technical plans using written artifacts (e.g., tech specs, ADRs, project plans).
• Ensure backend systems meet performance, maintainability, and scalability goals.

Requirements

• 3+ years of backend software engineering experience.
• Familiarity with Domain-Driven Design, distributed systems, and how architecture choices impact performance and maintainability.
• Experience with backend concepts including:
  • Data modeling
  • API design (HTTP and RPC)
  • State machines
  • Event-driven architecture
  • Database design
• Experience with monitoring and alerting tools (e.g., Sentry, Rollbar, Chronosphere, Kibana).
• Must have either equivalent practical experience or a Bachelor’s degree in a related field.
• Excellent communication skills and strong asynchronous communication.

Nice-to-haves

• Experience designing, developing, and launching backend systems with Affirm’s stack:
  • AWS, gRPC, Snowflake, Kotlin, Python, MySQL, Kubernetes
• Java/Kotlin experience is especially helpful.