Senior Software Engineer - Backend, Workload Safety

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.

Affirm's engineering team is building a large-scale, highly available, and global infrastructure that is shared across multiple financial products. Ensuring that our infrastructure is accessible to all engineers is critical to the success of the business. We pride ourselves on our culture across engineering of engaging in thorough technical design review, operational excellence, and capable incident response and analysis.

Affirm runs its workloads on more than 85 Amazon EKS clusters, and the number is growing. The Workload Safety team creates one set of standards for how workloads are configured and run, so Affirm can grow globally and still meet its availability and latency SLOs. The team identifies the industry best practices Affirm needs, drives their adoption across every engineering team on EKS, and enforces them through policy and automation so new workloads comply by default.

As a senior engineer on the team, you will help set its roadmap, decide which standards matter most, and build a repeatable way to take each standard from research to enforcement across the fleet.

• Define and evolve workload safety standards for Affirm's EKS fleet, such as CPU and memory settings, workload isolation and placement, tolerance for disruption, graceful termination to name a few
• Own each standard end to end: research and prototyping, white-glove onboarding for early adopters, self-service guidance for everyone else, and automation and policy guardrails that keep every workload compliant from day one
• Lead cross-team initiatives from design through fleet-wide rollout, mentor other engineers, and set a high bar for design, code review, and operational readiness
• Isolate workloads by criticality and resource profile so one misbehaving workload cannot degrade critical paths such as checkout
• Fix stuck workloads and node lifecycle problems, such as pods that ignore termination signals, pod disruption budgets that block node cycling, and Karpenter timeouts that prevent bin packing and the removal of excess capacity
• Determine the safe operating limits of each cluster (pod count, node count, API server request volume), keep clusters within them, and develop control plane scaling patterns for bursty workloads such as scheduled batch jobs and large deployments
• Analyze workload resource profiles across the fleet (CPU, memory, disk, network) to guide EC2 instance type strategy, and automate that analysis as workloads change
• Measure each standard's impact on availability, latency, risk, and cost, and use the results to prioritize the roadmap
• Participate in on-call for Kubernetes runtime issues across the fleet, and turn recurring failure patterns into roadmap items
• Work closely with the teams that run services, batch jobs, and ML workloads on EKS, and with the deployment, capacity, and SRE teams
• Keep up with new best practices from the Kubernetes community and adapt them to Affirm's needs

• 5+ years of experience running Kubernetes in production at scale, ideally Amazon EKS across many clusters
• Deep understanding of Kubernetes resource management and scheduling: requests and limits, OOM and CPU throttling behavior, affinity and anti-affinity, taints and tolerations, and topology spread constraints
• Solid grasp of the 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 (for example, OPA Gatekeeper or Kyverno)
• Proficiency in Go or Python, including building production infrastructure software such as Kubernetes controllers, operators, or admission webhooks
• Strong production debugging skills and a demonstrated ability to turn recurring incidents into systemic fixes
• Track record of leading technical initiatives across multiple teams, driving adoption of shared standards, and mentoring other engineers
• Experience quantifying the impact of infrastructure changes on availability, latency, and cost
• Strong written communication, including standards and guidance that teams can adopt on their own

[**THE BELOW ARE INSTRUCTIONS FOR RECRUITERS.*** WHEN COPYING INTO WORKDAY, INCLUDE ALL OF THE TEXT BELOW.DO NOT DELETE OR FILL OUT ANY OF THE INFORMATION BELOW.]
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Base Pay Grade -
Equity Grade -
Employees new to Affirm typically come in at the start of the pay range. Affirm focuses on providing a simple and transparent pay structure which is based on a variety of factors, including location, experience and job-related skills.
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: $X - $X
USA base pay range (all other U.S. states) per year: $X - $X
[DELETE IF NOT APPLICABLE TO ROLE] For U.S. variable roles use the template below:

Base Pay Grade -
Equity Grade -
Employees new to Affirm typically come in at the start of the pay range. Affirm focuses on providing a simple and transparent pay structure which is based on a variety of factors, including location, experience and job-related skills.
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.)
For sales roles, the range provided is the role’s On Target Earnings ("OTE") range, which includes the annual base pay and the sales incentive target.
USA On Target Earnings (CA, WA, NY, NJ, CT) per year: $X - $X
USA On Target Earnings (all other U.S. states) per year: $X - $X
[DELETE IF NOT APPLICABLE TO ROLE] For CAN/GBR roles use the template below:

Base Pay Grade -
Equity Grade -
Employees new to Affirm typically come in at the start of the pay range. Affirm focuses on providing a simple and transparent pay structure which is based on a variety of factors, including location, experience and job-related skills. [IF APPLICABLE] For sales roles, the range provided is the role’s On Target Earnings ("OTE") range, which includes the annual base pay and the sales incentive target.
Base pay is part of a total compensation package that may include monthly stipends for health, wellness and tech spending, and benefits (including 100% subsidized medical coverage, dental and vision for you and your dependents). In addition, the employees may be eligible for equity rewards offered by Affirm Holdings, Inc. (parent company).
(CHOOSE ONE - CAN or GBR) base pay range per year: $X - $X
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Total Rewards

We believe the people building honest financial products at Affirm should share in its success. That's why our total rewards are designed to support your health, growth, financial well-being, and future.

In service of our mission, we reward employees through a combination of base pay, equity (from parent company), and comprehensive benefits.

Base Pay Grade – N

$XXX-$XXX

Base pay ranges and placement within those ranges are determined based on several factors, including role, experience, and job-related skills.

In addition to base pay, all employees in this role are eligible to receive equity from the parent company each year. This means as Affirm’s parent company grows, employees have the opportunity to share in that growth financially.

Equity Grade – 4 (awarded in US Dollars)

Affirm Holdings, Inc. Equity Grade example

Equity grade: 2

New hire equity: $16,000-$24,000

Annual Refresh: $5,000

Reward equity: $0-$75,000

Affirm also provides flexible spending wallets to all employees for technology and wellbeing related needs, which are reimbursable up to 1390 zł per month.

In addition to your compensation, our comprehensive benefits are designed to support you and the people who matter most. Benefits include:

• Competitive paid time off, paid public holidays, and additional paid Away Days to rest and recharge.
• Comprehensive private healthcare through Lux Med's Platinum package.
• A MultiSport card to support your health and well-being.
• Learning and development programs to help you grow professionally. 
• Family healthcare support through Maven and parental leave support through Parentaly.
• Mental well-being support through Lyra, including up to 12 confidential counseling or coaching sessions each year for you and your household members.
• Financial well-being support through Northstar, with unlimited access to Certified Financial Advisors and planning tools at no cost to you.
• Employee Resource Groups (ERGs) that foster connection and inclusion.
• Eligibility for creative tax benefits, subject to applicable law, role, and company policy.
   

Location - Remote Poland

The majority of our roles can be located anywhere in Poland.

**This job description is not a contractual document, and is not intended to have binding force.**

LI-Remote

[DELETE IF NOT APPLICABLE TO ROLE] For ESP roles use the template below:
Compensation & Benefits

Base Pay Grade -
Equity Grade -
Employees new to Affirm typically come in at the start of the pay range. Affirm focuses on providing a simple and transparent pay structure which is based on a variety of factors, including location, experience and job-related skills.
Base pay is part of a total compensation package that may include monthly stipends for health, wellness and tech spending, and benefits (including 100% subsidized medical coverage, dental and vision for you and your dependents). In addition, the employees may be eligible for equity rewards offered by Affirm Holdings, Inc. (parent company).
ESP base pay range per year: €X - €X
Additional benefits include:
• Flexible Spending Wallets for tech, food and lifestyle
• Away Days - wellness days to take off work and recharge
• Learning & Development programs
• Parental benefits
• Employee Resource & Community Groups
[ONLY KEEP THIS IF WE DO NOT SPONSOR THE ROLE] Please note that visa sponsorship is not available for this position.
[REMOVE IF POSTING IS NOT REMOTE] LI-Remote