Staff Software Engineer (Identity Decisioning)

As a Staff Software Engineer at Affirm, your responsibilities will include setting the technical strategy for your team, collaborating across various departments to ensure the sustainability of product development, and enhancing system operations. You will also be responsible for leading by example regarding coding standards and mentoring your team members.

Affirm requires candidates for the Staff Software Engineer position to have at least 8 years of experience in designing and launching backend systems at scale, along with proficiency in programming languages like Python or Kotlin. Ideal candidates will have a strong background in developing distributed systems using technologies such as AWS and Kubernetes.

At Affirm, we believe in nurturing talent. Staff Software Engineers are encouraged to provide feedback and lead initiatives that establish a culture of quality. You will have opportunities for professional growth, mentoring others, and presenting your ideas to advocate for technical solutions that drive the company forward.

Affirm offers a remote-first culture that promotes flexibility and work-life balance. Our team members are encouraged to collaborate effectively across global teams while enjoying the benefits of remote work, enabling them to work comfortably from anywhere in Canada.

The compensation for a Staff Software Engineer at Affirm ranges from $178,000 to $228,000 per year, depending on experience and location. In addition to competitive pay, you’ll enjoy comprehensive health coverage, flexible spending wallets, generous time off, and participation in an employee stock purchase plan.

In your response, highlight specific projects you've undertaken, technologies used, the challenges encountered, and the impact your work had on the systems you developed. Discuss your familiarity with distributed systems and how you ensured their reliability.

Talk about your method for analyzing project requirements and aligning them with business goals. Discuss how you would involve team members in the decision-making process to ensure buy-in and foster a collaborative environment.

Choose a specific example where your collaboration with teams like Product or Compliance led to a successful outcome. Explain your role, the communication strategies you used, and what you learned from the experience.

Discuss your approach to code reviews, the importance of clean code, and how you would communicate these standards to your team at Affirm. Include specific examples of how those standards improved the codebase.

Explain your strategies for monitoring systems, creating effective alerting policies, and maintaining documentation like playbooks. Discuss your experience with on-call rotations and how you handle incidents when they arise.

Share your experience with various testing frameworks and monitoring tools that you've used for backend development. Emphasize how these tools contribute to system reliability and your hands-on experience with them.

Discuss your approach to soliciting feedback on your work and how you incorporate that feedback into your projects. Provide examples of how this iterative process has led to better outcomes.

Detail your hands-on experience using AWS services for backend development, any specific projects you've contributed to, and how you leveraged AWS to solve scaling and performance challenges.

Share your techniques for navigating unclear requirements. This may include asking clarifying questions, conducting research, or involving stakeholders to define expectations and establish a clearer direction.

Provide a concrete example of a feature that you delivered, detailing the process, technologies used, challenges faced, and its positive impact on the business and its users.