Staff Software Engineer, Backend (Growth Platform)

The Growth Platform team builds shared backend platforms that power incentives, experimentation, personalization, and data-driven decisioning across Affirm’s consumer and merchant experiences, directly influencing customer acquisition, engagement, and retention.

What you’ll do

• You will be responsible for setting technical strategy for your team on a year-long time scale, owning backend platforms that power incentives and growth initiatives across Affirm.
• You will collaborate with product management, analytics, and partner teams to shape technical direction for incentive systems, ensuring long-term sustainability, correctness, and clear trade-offs that inform roadmap decisions.
• You will act as a force-multiplier by defining platform abstractions, APIs, and architectural patterns that enable product teams to safely launch, experiment with, and evolve incentive-based experiences.
• You take ownership of your team’s operations and availability by ensuring robust monitoring, alerting, playbooks, and on-call practices are in place for business-critical incentive and growth systems. 
• You will foster a culture of quality and ownership by setting clear design and code review standards, and advocating for them beyond your immediate team through written proposals and technical discussions.
• You will help develop talent on your team by providing actionable feedback, technical guidance, and leadership on complex, high-impact systems.
   

What we look for

• You have 8+ years of experience designing, developing, and launching backend systems at scale using languages like Python or Kotlin.
• You have an extensive track record of developing highly available distributed systems using technologies such as AWS, MySQL, Spark, and Kubernetes.
• You have experience building or evolving shared backend platforms that support Rewards, Loyalty, Incentives, Experimentation, or other growth-critical workflows used by multiple product teams.
• You have led complex technical initiatives that required cross-team alignment, long-term architectural thinking, and influence without direct authority.
• You have experience delivering major features, system components, or deprecating existing functionality through the definition and execution of a clear technical plan. You write high quality code that is easily understood and used by others.
• You thrive in ambiguity, and are comfortable moving from low-level language idioms to the architecture of large-scale systems to understand how they work end to end.
• Your growth and impact trajectory demonstrates that you have mastered gathering, incorporating, and iterating on feedback from engineering and cross-functional peers.
• You have strong verbal and written communication skills that support effective collaboration with a global engineering organization.
• This position requires either equivalent practical experience or a Bachelor’s degree in a related field.
   

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