Senior Software Engineer, Backend – Workload Safety

This is a fully remote position, open to applicants in Canada.

📋 Description

• Define and enhance safety standards for Affirm's Amazon EKS fleet workloads.

• Take ownership of standards from research and prototyping to onboarding, self-service guidance, automation, and policy guardrails.

• Lead initiatives across teams from design to fleet-wide implementation.

• Mentor engineers and establish benchmarks for design, code reviews, and operational readiness.

• Isolate workloads based on criticality and resource profiles.

• Address stuck workloads and manage node lifecycle challenges.

• Identify safe operating limits for clusters and create control-plane scaling strategies.

• Analyze workload resource profiles to inform EC2 instance strategies and automate this analysis.

• Evaluate the impact of standards on availability, latency, risk, and cost to prioritize the roadmap.

• Participate in on-call support for Kubernetes runtime issues.

• Work collaboratively with service, batch, ML, deployment, capacity, and SRE teams.

• Monitor Kubernetes community best practices and tailor them to meet Affirm's requirements.

⛳️ Requirements

• Over 5 years of experience managing Kubernetes in a production environment at scale, preferably with Amazon EKS across multiple clusters.

• In-depth knowledge of Kubernetes resource management and scheduling, including requests and limits, OOM and CPU throttling behavior, affinity and anti-affinity, taints and tolerations, and topology spread constraints.

• Strong understanding of pod lifecycle and disruption management, such as graceful termination, pod disruption budgets, and node draining.

• Experience in enforcing configuration standards through admission control and policy-as-code, including OPA Gatekeeper or Kyverno.

• Proficient in Go or Python, particularly in production infrastructure software like Kubernetes controllers, operators, or admission webhooks.

• Excellent debugging skills in production environments and the capability to transform recurring incidents into systemic solutions.

• Proven track record of leading technical initiatives across various teams, promoting the adoption of shared standards, and mentoring engineers.

• Experience in quantifying the impact of infrastructure changes on availability, latency, and costs.

• Strong written communication skills.

🏝️ Benefits

• Monthly stipends for health, wellness, and technology expenses.

• Complete medical coverage, including dental and vision, fully subsidized for employees and their dependents.

• Flexible time off policy.

• Generous holiday schedule.

• Employee stock purchase plan (ESPP) offering discounted Affirm stock.

• Inclusive interview process with accommodations for candidates with disabilities.

• Remote-first work flexibility.

• In-person onboarding experience provided for all new hires.