Senior Software Engineer, Backend (Workload Safety)

The posting, as Affirm wrote it

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.

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.
What you’ll do

• 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 ru

[…]
ts). 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

Remote-first with flexibility built in
Affirm is proud to be a remote-first company. Most roles can be done from almost anywhere within the country of employment. Some positions may occasionally require in-person work at an Affirm office, and a few are office-based due to the nature of the work. All new hires will be invited to attend an in-person onboarding experience.

Benefits designed for you
Our benefits reflect our commitment to care, transparency, and flexibility. Here are a few highlights:

• Health coverage at no cost: We cover 100% of premiums for employees and their dependents.
• Spending stipends: Monthly stipends support your tech setup, and the ability to choose health and wellness options that are right for you.
• Time off to recharge: Flexible time off and generous holiday calendars help you rest when you need to.
• Own a piece of what you build: Our employee stock purchase plan (ESPP) lets you buy Affirm stock at a discount.

We’re committed to providing an inclusive interview process, including accommodations for candidates with disabilities. If you need support, we’re happy to help.

For positions based in San Francisco or Los Angeles: Affirm considers qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records, as required by law.

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