The opportunity
Affirm is building its own bank — and this role is one of the most senior individual-contributor seats on the engineering team that runs it. We're looking for a Staff Software Engineer to be a technical anchor for a deliberately small, AI-native team that owns the systems behind…
What you'll do
Set technical direction across the bank's systems. Own the: medium-to-long-term technical strategy for the bank's core surfaces — cloud infrastructure, data platform, core banking configuration, CI/CD, networking, and the Bank ↔ Affirm Inc integration — and make the architecture calls the rest of the team builds against. Generalist breadth is expected; you go deep where the risk is highest.
Own the hardest problems end-to-end. Personally design, build, integrate, and: operate the most ambiguous and highest-stakes pieces of the stack, and own incident response for them. You take the problems no one else can fully scope and turn them into well-defined systems with clear failure domains, monitoring, and runbooks.
Be the force multiplier on a small team. Set and hold the bar for code: review, design review, and examiner-readable documentation. Establish the patterns and standards that let a deliberately small team punch far above its size, and level up every engineer who joins after you.
Ship AI-first, and push the frontier of it. Treat AI tools and agentic: workflows as a load-bearing capability for code, design review, runbook generation, and operations — and actively push yourself and the team on what an AI-leveraged engineering function can deliver in place of additional headcount.
Lead vendor selection and ownership. Drive evaluation, integration, and: ongoing oversight of the bank's third-party platforms across the core, data, identity, observability, and card-processing stacks. Carry the bank's most critical vendor relationships end-to-end: integration, operations, escalation, and audit.
Define the integration boundary with Affirm Inc. Set the domain edges, data: flows, and integration patterns between the bank and Affirm Inc so the bank's products work seamlessly inside the Affirm ecosystem while preserving the legal and regulatory separation the charter requires. Drive this across Affirm Inc engineering teams whose systems integrate with the bank's.
What they're looking for
- Build for examiners. Partner with Legal, Compliance, Risk, BSA/AML, Finance,: and Internal Audit so compliance is a property of the product from day one. The systems you design are the artifacts FDIC and state examiners will inspect — design and document them to a standard that holds up under examination and audit review.
- Own the operational posture of the bank's systems. Set the reliability,: observability, alerting, runbook, incident-response, and disaster-recovery practices that keep the bank standalone-operable and audit-ready, while keeping the operational footprint intentionally small.
- Influence up and across the organization. Communicate technical strategy,: tradeoffs, and constraints with clarity to bank executives, the Bank Board, Compliance, Risk — and to engineers outside the bank across the broader Affirm org. The relationships you build beyond the team shape how cleanly the integration boundary works.
- Help grow the team and the bar. As engineers join, they inherit a function: whose architecture, practices, and standards you helped set. Mentor peers, provide high-signal feedback, contribute to hiring, and lead by example.
