Senior Staff Software Engineer, Backend (Compute Platform)Posted today$209K–$269K

The opportunity

At Affirm, we exist for the moments that matter—giving people a clear, predictable way to pay over time, with no hidden fees, no surprises, and no tradeoffs on what matters most.

What you'll do

  • Architect and evolve Affirm's EKS platform, driving strategy across cluster: lifecycle, node management, and shared cluster components

  • Lead the technical direction for cluster provisioning, upgrades, and teardown: through standardized IaC (Terraform, Spacelift) and self-service workflows

  • Own the reliability of core shared components across the fleet (Karpenter,: CoreDNS, VPC CNI, Kube Proxy, Metrics Server, etc) and the CI/CD pipeline that ships them consistently

  • Define and enforce EKS workload safety standards covering resource: configuration, workload isolation and blast radius, disruption tolerance (PDBs), Karpenter consolidation strategies, etc

  • Build the enforcement and automation path that moves each standard from: research and white-glove onboarding through broad adoption to policy-enforced defaults for new workloads

  • Establish the observability, baseline audits, and reporting needed to: identify hot spots and measure risk mitigation over time

What they're looking for

  • Partner with cluster-user teams (checkout, batch, ML, analytics, DevProd,: etc) to understand workload needs and shape the platform accordingly
  • Drive cost and capacity strategy across node scaling, bin packing, and EC2 instance selection
  • Mentor engineers across the Compute Platform teams and set the bar for operational excellence
  • Participate in the on-call rotation, triage and catalogue runtime K8s issues,: and collaborate with SRE on production incidents