Senior Staff Software Engineer, Backend (Compute Platform)

Location: Remote US

Department: Infrastructure Platform Eng

Affirms engineering team is building a large-scale, highly-available, and global infrastructure that is shared across multiple financial products. Ensuring that our infrastructure is accessible to all engineers is critical to the success of the business. We pride ourselves on our culture across engineering of engaging in thorough technical design review, operational excellence, and capable incident response and analysis.

The Compute Platform team owns the EKS foundation that Affirms products run on, from cluster provisioning and lifecycle through the safety standards that keep thousands of workloads reliable at scale. Affirm operates 90+ EKS clusters across environments and regions, and this team is responsible for making that fleet standardized, automated, observable, and self-healing, while establishing and enforcing the workload configuration standards that protect availability. Our mission is to provide a secure, reliable, and scalable Kubernetes platform that lets infrastructure and application teams deploy and operate with confidence and minimal operational friction.

What you’ll do

As a member of the Compute Platform organization, you will collaborate with other teams - including Product, Infrastructure, Traffic, Cost & Capacity Engineering to:

• Architect and evolve Affirms EKS platform, driving strategy across cluster lifecycle, node management, and shared cluster components

• Lead the technical direction for cluster provisioning, upgrades, and teardown through standardized IaC (Terraform, Spacelift) and self-service workflows

• Own the reliability of core shared components across the fleet (Karpenter, CoreDNS, VPC CNI, Kube Proxy, Metrics Server, etc) and the CI/CD pipeline that ships them consistently

• Define and enforce EKS workload safety standards covering resource configuration, workload isolation and blast radius, disruption tolerance (PDBs), Karpenter consolidation strategies, etc

• Build the enforcement and automation path that moves each standard from research and white-glove onboarding through broad adoption to policy-enforced defaults for new workloads

• Establish the observability, baseline audits, and reporting needed to identify hot spots and measure risk mitigation over time

• Partner with cluster-user teams (checkout, batch, ML, analytics, DevProd, etc) to understand workload needs and shape the platform accordingly

• Drive cost and capacity strategy across node scaling, bin packing, and EC2 instance selection

• Mentor engineers across the Compute Platform teams and set the bar for operational excellence

• Participate in the on-call rotation, triage and catalogue runtime K8s issues, and collaborate with SRE on production incidents

What we look for

• Deep EKS and Kubernetes internals expertise, including cluster upgrades, node lifecycle, scheduling, and autoscaling (Karpenter, Cluster Autoscaler)

• Demonstrated experience automating Kubernetes operations at fleet scale, from cluster provisioning, upgrades, and node lifecycle to self-healing remediation and policy-driven enforcement, replacing manual toil with auditable, self-service workflows

• Strong grasp of workload reliability patterns: resource tuning, probes, PDBs, topology and isolation constraints

• Experience designing and enforcing platform standards through policy (admission control, OPA/Gatekeeper or equivalent) and automated frameworks

• Infrastructure as Code fluency with Terraform and a GitOps or pipeline-driven delivery model (ArgoCD, kube-applier, or similar)

• Observability instincts: defining SLOs, building metrics, logs, and alerting coverage, and running data-driven baseline audits

• Cross-functional collaboration skills with platform, product, SRE, and capacity teams

• Demonstrated mentorship and technical leadership across teams

• Drive to track emerging Kubernetes community best practices and adapt them to Affirms needs

 Qualifications

• 10+ years in software or infrastructure engineering with proven delivery of complex platform solutions

• 6+ years hands-on operating production Kubernetes at scale, ideally EKS on AWS

• Strong cloud-native architecture experience on AWS (EC2, VPC, IAM, EKS)

• Experience with Infrastructure-as-Code (Terraform, Spacelift a plus) and GitOps-style deployment pipelines

• Expert-level proficiency in Go or Python and a proven track record building production-grade Kubernetes controllers, operators, and platform tooling that other engineering teams depend on

• Track record designing and enforcing standards across many teams without becoming a bottleneck

• Exceptional problem-solving and systems-thinking skills

• Demonstrated leadership and cross-functional influence

• Excellent communication skills

Base Pay Grade - R

Equity Grade - 15

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: $265,000 - $325,000

USA base pay range (all other U.S. states) per year: $236,000 - $296,000

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