Senior Backend Software Engineer

Role Overview

As a Senior Backend Software Engineer at Affirm, you will be a technical leader building the new lifecycle-orchestrator service. You’ll improve system availability, modernize the existing codebase, and help scale the platform to support hundreds of thousands of merchants.

Key Missions

• Lead engineering efforts to build the lifecycle-orchestrator service and modernize legacy parts of the platform.
• Design and expand platform capabilities to scale, aligning scope and delivery with other teams.
• Mentor engineers and partner with the Engineering Manager and Team Lead to drive the team’s long-term vision.

Responsibilities

• Own technical leadership for backend system design and implementation.
• Collaborate across teams to align project scope and architecture.
• Provide guidance to engineers through mentoring and technical direction.

Requirements

• 5+ years of experience as a backend software engineer.
• Strong proficiency in:
  • Data modeling
  • API design (HTTP and RPC)
  • State machines
  • Event-driven architecture
  • Database design
• Experience designing, developing, and launching backend systems.
• Monitoring/alerting experience (e.g., Sentry, Rollbar, Chronosphere, Kibana).
• Excellent written and verbal communication, including asynchronous artifacts (tech specs, ADRs, project plans).
• Strong understanding of Domain-Driven Design (DDD), distributed systems, and the performance/maintainability impact of architectural choices.

Nice to Have

• Experience with the mentioned stack is preferred, especially Java/Kotlin.

Stack (from posting)

• AWS, gRPC, Snowflake, Kotlin, Python, MySQL, Kubernetes