Affirm

Senior Software Engineer, Backend (Workload Safety)

Affirm
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2 hours ago
Remote, United StatesSenior
H1B sponsor

Base Salary

$173k - $255k/yr

Responsibilities

  • Define and evolve workload safety standards for Affirm’s Amazon EKS fleet.
  • Own standards from research and prototyping through onboarding, self-service guidance, automation, and policy enforcement.
  • Lead cross-team technical initiatives through design and fleet-wide rollout while mentoring engineers.
  • Isolate workloads by criticality and resource profile to protect critical paths.
  • Debug stuck workloads, node lifecycle issues, pod disruption problems, and Karpenter timeouts.
  • Determine safe cluster operating limits and develop control-plane scaling patterns for bursty workloads.
  • Analyze CPU, memory, disk, and network profiles to guide EC2 instance strategy and automate the analysis.
  • Measure the impact of standards on availability, latency, risk, and cost.
  • Participate in on-call for Kubernetes runtime issues and convert recurring failures into systemic fixes.
  • Collaborate with service, batch, ML workload, deployment, capacity, and SRE teams.

Requirements

  • 5+ years of experience running Kubernetes in production at scale, ideally Amazon EKS across many clusters.
  • Deep understanding of Kubernetes resource management and scheduling, including requests and limits, OOM behavior, CPU throttling, affinity, anti-affinity, taints, tolerations, and topology spread constraints.
  • Strong knowledge of pod lifecycle and disruption management, including graceful termination, pod disruption budgets, and node draining.
  • Experience enforcing configuration standards through admission control and policy-as-code, such as OPA Gatekeeper or Kyverno.
  • Proficiency in Go or Python and experience building production infrastructure software such as Kubernetes controllers, operators, or admission webhooks.
  • Strong production debugging skills and ability to turn recurring incidents into systemic fixes.
  • Experience leading technical initiatives across multiple teams, driving adoption of shared standards, and mentoring engineers.
  • Experience quantifying infrastructure changes’ effects on availability, latency, and cost.
  • Strong written communication skills for creating standards and guidance.
  • Bachelor’s degree in a related field or equivalent practical experience.

Benefits

  • Remote-first work arrangement with flexibility within the country of employment; occasional in-person office work may be required and new hires attend in-person onboarding.
  • 100% subsidized medical coverage, including coverage for employees and dependents, plus dental and vision benefits.
  • Monthly technology, health, and wellness spending stipends.
  • Flexible time off and generous holiday calendars.
  • Employee stock purchase plan with a discounted stock purchase option.
  • Inclusive interview process with accommodations available for candidates with disabilities.

Categories

Affirm

About Affirm

1,001-5,000 employees

Affirm provides buy now, pay later installment financing at online and in-store checkout, along with a consumer app and virtual card, for shoppers and merchants. It monetizes through merchant fees and interest on select loans, with no late fees. Founded in 2012 and headquartered in San Francisco, Affirm is a public company listed on NASDAQ that powers payments for thousands of ecommerce retailers.

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