Staff Software Engineer, Backend (Order Platform) Remote US

About This Role

Shaping the systems that power every Affirm purchase after checkout – orders, captures, refunds, and settlement – is the core of this Staff Software Engineer role on the Order Platform team. This position drives the technical strategy that enables merchants and consumers to transact reliably, raising the bar for reliability and simplicity across engineering systems. The role involves consolidating the internal platform behind Affirm's post-checkout APIs, drawing clean domain boundaries, migrating existing merchants, and enabling future product launches.

Responsibilities

• Set technical strategy for your team on a year-long time scale, tying it together with critical, business-impacting projects
• Collaborate across teams in the product development lifecycle with product management, design, and analytics to ensure technical sustainability, risks, and trade-offs are well understood and managed
• Act as a force-multiplier for your team through the definition and advocacy of technical solutions and operational processes
• Take ownership of your team’s operations and availability by ensuring the right monitoring, triage rotations, playbooks, policies, testing, and alerting are in place to support “keep the lights on” and on-call efforts
• Foster a culture of quality and ownership on your team by setting code review and design standards, and advocating for them beyond your team through writing and tech talks
• Help develop talent on your team by providing feedback and guidance, and leading by example

Requirements

• 8+ years of experience designing, developing, and launching backend systems at scale using languages like Python or Kotlin
• Extensive track record of developing highly available distributed systems using technologies like AWS, MySQL, Spark, and Kubernetes
• Analytical and discerning in designing services with clear API boundaries, strong reliability characteristics, and thoughtful handling of consistency, idempotency, and failure modes – ideally in a payments, commerce, ledger, or other financially-sensitive domain
• Experience delivering major features, system components, or deprecating existing functionality in a system through the definition of a technical and execution plan
• Write high-quality code that is easily understood and used by others
• Thrive in ambiguity, and are comfortable moving from low-level language idioms all the way to the architecture of large systems to understand how they work
• Growth and impact trajectory demonstrates mastery in gathering and iterating on feedback from engineering and cross-functional peers
• Strong verbal and written communication skills that support effective collaboration with a global engineering team
• Equivalent practical experience or a Bachelor’s degree in a related field