Senior Staff Software Engineer, Backend – Compute Platform

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

📋 Description

• Design and enhance Affirm’s EKS platform throughout its cluster lifecycle, node management, and shared cluster components.

• Guide the technical strategy for cluster provisioning, upgrades, and decommissioning utilizing Terraform, Spacelift, and self-service workflows.

• Manage the reliability of shared components such as Karpenter, CoreDNS, VPC CNI, Kube Proxy, and Metrics Server.

• Oversee the CI/CD pipeline that reliably delivers shared platform components.

• Establish and enforce EKS workload safety standards addressing resource configuration, isolation, blast radius, disruption tolerance, and consolidation strategies.

• Develop enforcement and automation procedures ranging from research and onboarding to widespread adoption and policy-driven defaults.

• Implement observability, baseline audits, and reporting to pinpoint hotspots and assess risk reduction.

• Collaborate with teams such as checkout, batch, ML, analytics, DevProd, and other cluster-user groups.

• Direct cost and capacity strategies focusing on node scaling, bin packing, and EC2 instance selection.

• Mentor engineers within Compute Platform teams and establish benchmarks for operational excellence.

• Participate in on-call rotations, troubleshoot and document runtime Kubernetes issues, and work alongside SRE on production incidents.

⛳️ Requirements

• Extensive expertise in EKS and Kubernetes internals, particularly in cluster upgrades, node lifecycle, scheduling, and autoscaling (Karpenter, Cluster Autoscaler).

• Proven experience in automating Kubernetes operations at fleet scale, including provisioning, upgrades, node lifecycle, self-healing remediation, and policy-driven enforcement.

• Strong understanding of workload reliability patterns: resource tuning, probes, PDBs, topology, and isolation constraints.

• Experience in designing and enforcing platform standards through policy, including admission control and OPA/Gatekeeper or a similar framework.

• Proficiency in Infrastructure as Code, specifically with Terraform and GitOps or pipeline-driven delivery models such as ArgoCD or kube-applier.

• Observability expertise in defining SLOs, creating metrics, logs, and alerting coverage, and conducting data-driven baseline audits.

• Over 10 years of experience in software or infrastructure engineering with a successful track record of delivering complex platform solutions.

• At least 6 years of hands-on experience operating production Kubernetes at scale, preferably EKS on AWS.

• Strong experience in cloud-native architecture on AWS, including EC2, VPC, IAM, and EKS.

• Familiarity with Infrastructure-as-Code and GitOps-style deployment pipelines.

• Expert-level skills in Go or Python.

• Proven experience in developing production-grade Kubernetes controllers, operators, and platform tools.

• History of designing and enforcing standards across multiple teams.

• Outstanding problem-solving and systems-thinking abilities.

• Demonstrated leadership and cross-functional influence.

• Either equivalent practical experience or a Bachelor’s degree in a related field.

🏝️ Benefits

• 100% subsidized medical coverage for employees and their dependents.

• Dental and vision coverage for employees and their dependents.

• Monthly tech setup spending stipend.

• Monthly health and wellness spending stipends.

• Flexible time off.

• Generous holiday calendars.

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

• Remote-first flexibility within the country of employment.

• In-person onboarding experience for all new hires.

• Inclusive interview process and disability accommodations.