Staff Software Engineer, Backend (Order Platform)

About the Role

As a Staff Software Engineer on the Order Platform team, you'll shape the systems that power every Affirm purchase after checkout — orders, captures, refunds, and settlement — and drive the technical strategy that lets our merchants and consumers transact reliably at scale. Your work raises the bar for reliability and simplicity across our engineering systems, keeping the platform highly available while defining the capabilities that unlock future product needs.

We're a small, senior team doing high-leverage work within Financial Platforms. Today we're consolidating the internal platform behind Affirm's post-checkout APIs — drawing clean domain boundaries, migrating existing merchants, and enabling future product launches. You'll set technical direction, mentor a strong group of engineers, and own decisions that matter for years.

What You'll Do

• Responsible for setting technical strategy for your team on a year-long time scale, connecting it with critical, business-impacting projects.
• Collaborate across teams in the product development lifecycle with product management, design, and analytics to manage technical sustainability, risks, and trade-offs.
• Act as a force-multiplier for your team through definition and advocacy of technical solutions and operational processes.
• Take ownership of your team’s operations and availability by ensuring appropriate monitoring, triage rotations, playbooks, testing, and alerting are in place for on-call efforts.
• Foster a culture of quality and ownership by setting code review and design standards, advocating for them through writing and tech talks.
• Help develop talent on your team through feedback, 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.
• Analytical and discerning in designing services with clear API boundaries, strong reliability characteristics, and handling of consistency, idempotency, and failure modes (ideally in payments, commerce, ledger, or financially-sensitive domains).
• Experience delivering major features, system components, or deprecating existing functionality through technical execution plans.
• Ability to thrive in ambiguity, moving from low-level language idioms to large-scale system architecture.
• Demonstrated trajectory of gathering and iterating on peer feedback.
• Strong verbal and written communication skills.
• Requires either equivalent practical experience or a Bachelor’s degree in a related field.