Staff Software Engineer, Backend (Capacity Modeling)

Affirm is reinventing credit to make it more honest and friendly, giving consumers the flexibility to buy now and pay later without any hidden fees or compounding interest. We help people pay over time for almost anything—with no late fees or surprises. Through advanced technology and analytics that look beyond FICO, we’re able to serve a much broader population than other lenders.

The Capacity Modeling team ensures Affirm can safely handle forecasted traffic—especially during peak sales events—by translating demand forecasts into concrete, testable capacity plans. They build and maintain statistical capacity models that map traffic inputs (e.g., checkout volume, app opens, batch/job activity) to resource outputs (CPU, memory, connections) and then convert those forecasts into recommended capacity settings such as pod counts, HPA ranges, and/or infrastructure sizing changes across regions and environments. The coverage of infrastructure resources includes not only Compute but also infrastructure such as ElasticCache, DynamoDB, AuroraDB, and more.

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

• 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.
• Experience supporting scale up and down of large scale sales events such as Prime Day, Black Friday Cyber Monday, or other sales holidays.
• Tuned autoscaling, CPU/Memory, and multi-threading for compute type workloads.
• 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 of gathering and iterating on feedback from engineering and cross-functional peers.
• Strong verbal and written communication skills that support effective collaboration with our global engineering team.
• This position requires either equivalent practical experience or a Bachelor’s degree in a related field.

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: 230,000 - 290,000

USA base pay range (all other U.S. states) per year: 204,000 - 264,000

Base Pay Grade - P, Equity Grade - 13. Employees new to Affirm typically come in at the start of the pay range.

Affirm is proud to be a remote-first company! The majority of our roles are remote and you can work almost anywhere within the country of employment. Affirmers in proximal roles have the flexibility to work remotely, but will occasionally be required to work out of their assigned Affirm office.

Key benefits highlights include: Health care coverage - Affirm covers all premiums for all levels of coverage for you and your dependents; Flexible Spending Wallets - generous stipends for spending on Technology, Food, various Lifestyle needs, and family forming expenses; Time off - competitive vacation and holiday schedules; ESPP - An employee stock purchase plan enabling you to buy shares of Affirm at a discount.

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