Senior Staff Software Engineer, Backend – Compute Platform

Posted 3 hours ago

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About the role

  • Senior Staff Engineer architecting Affirm’s EKS and Kubernetes compute platform. Building secure, reliable infrastructure for Affirm’s global buy-now-pay-later financial products.

Responsibilities

  • Architect and evolve Affirm’s EKS platform across cluster lifecycle, node management, and shared cluster components
  • Lead technical direction for cluster provisioning, upgrades, and teardown using Terraform, Spacelift, and self-service workflows
  • Own reliability of shared components including Karpenter, CoreDNS, VPC CNI, Kube Proxy, and Metrics Server
  • Maintain the CI/CD pipeline that consistently ships shared platform components
  • Define and enforce EKS workload safety standards covering resource configuration, isolation, blast radius, disruption tolerance, and consolidation strategies
  • Build enforcement and automation from research and onboarding through broad adoption and policy-enforced defaults
  • Establish observability, baseline audits, and reporting to identify hotspots and measure risk mitigation
  • Partner with checkout, batch, ML, analytics, DevProd, and other cluster-user teams
  • Drive cost and capacity strategy across node scaling, bin packing, and EC2 instance selection
  • Mentor engineers across Compute Platform teams and set standards for operational excellence
  • Participate in on-call rotation, triage and catalog runtime Kubernetes issues, and collaborate with SRE on production incidents

Requirements

  • Deep EKS and Kubernetes internals expertise, including cluster upgrades, node lifecycle, scheduling, and autoscaling (Karpenter, Cluster Autoscaler)
  • Experience automating Kubernetes operations at fleet scale, including provisioning, upgrades, node lifecycle, self-healing remediation, and policy-driven enforcement
  • Strong grasp of workload reliability patterns: resource tuning, probes, PDBs, topology, and isolation constraints
  • Experience designing and enforcing platform standards through policy, including admission control and OPA/Gatekeeper or equivalent
  • Infrastructure as Code fluency with Terraform and GitOps or pipeline-driven delivery models such as ArgoCD or kube-applier
  • Observability experience defining SLOs, building metrics, logs, and alerting coverage, and running data-driven baseline audits
  • 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, including EC2, VPC, IAM, and EKS
  • Experience with Infrastructure-as-Code and GitOps-style deployment pipelines
  • Expert-level proficiency in Go or Python
  • Proven track record building production-grade Kubernetes controllers, operators, and platform tooling
  • Track record designing and enforcing standards across many teams
  • Exceptional problem-solving and systems-thinking skills
  • Demonstrated leadership and cross-functional influence
  • Either equivalent practical experience or a Bachelor’s degree in a related field

Benefits

  • 100% subsidized medical coverage for employees and their dependents
  • Dental and vision coverage for employees and their dependents
  • Monthly tech setup spending stipend
  • Monthly health and wellness spending stipends
  • Flexible time off
  • Generous holiday calendars
  • Employee stock purchase plan (ESPP) with discounted Affirm stock
  • Remote-first flexibility within the country of employment
  • In-person onboarding experience for all new hires
  • Inclusive interview process and disability accommodations

Job type

Full Time

Experience level

Senior

Salary

CA$209,000 - CA$269,000 per year

Degree requirement

No Education Requirement

Tech skills

AWSCloudEC2KubernetesNode.jsPythonTerraformGo

Location requirements

RemoteCanada

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