Staff Software Engineer, Backend (Identity Decisioning)

About the Role

Affirm’s Identity team is mission-critical to the customer checkout experience. When a customer chooses Affirm, one of the first steps is an identity check, and our ability to make the right decision directly impacts conversion, revenue, fraud exposure, and regulatory compliance. Our team owns Identity for all markets outside North America, playing a key role in Affirm’s international expansion. We are responsible for KYC, user lifecycle management, and identity decisioning across multiple regulatory environments. This work is about shaping how Affirm adapts its core Identity platform to new market dynamics, customer expectations, and compliance requirements.

What You'll Do

• Responsible for setting technical strategy for your team on a year-long time scale, and help your team tie it together with critical, business-impacting projects.
• Collaborate across teams in the product development lifecycle by collaborating with product management, design & analytics to ensure technical sustainability, risks and trade-offs are well understood and managed.
• Act as a force-multiplier for your team through your definition and advocacy of technical solutions and operational processes.
• Take ownership of your team’s operations and availability by ensuring you have the right monitoring, triage rotations, playbooks, policies, testing and alerting in place to support “keep the lights on” & on-call efforts.
• Foster a culture of quality and ownership on your team by setting code review and design standards for your team, and advocating for them beyond your team through your writing and tech talks.
• Help develop talent on your team by providing feedback and guidance, and leading by example.

What We Look For

• 8+ years of experience designing, developing and launching backend systems at scale using languages like Python or Kotlin.
• Extensive track record of developing highly available distributed systems using technologies like AWS, MySQL, Spark and Kubernetes.
• Experience delivering major features, system components or deprecating existing functionality in a system through the definition of a technical and execution plan.
• Ability to write high quality code that is easily understood and used by others.
• Thrive in ambiguity, comfortable moving from low level language idioms all the way to the architecture of large systems to understand how they work.
• Track record demonstrating mastery in gathering and iterating on feedback from engineering and cross-functional peers.
• Strong verbal and written communication skills supporting effective collaboration with a global engineering team.
• Requires either equivalent practical experience or a Bachelor’s degree in a related field.