Staff Software Engineer, Backend – Cost Engineering

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

📋 Description

• Establish a technical strategy for your team over the course of a year, ensuring alignment with essential, business-critical projects.

• Engage collaboratively across various teams throughout the product development lifecycle, working with product management, design, and analytics to guarantee that technical sustainability, risks, and trade-offs are effectively understood and managed.

• Serve as a force-multiplier for your team by defining and advocating for technical solutions and operational processes.

• Take responsibility for your team’s operations and availability by implementing appropriate monitoring, triage rotations, playbooks, policies, testing, and alerting mechanisms to support ongoing operations and on-call duties.

• Cultivate a culture of quality and ownership within your team by establishing code review and design standards, and promoting these standards beyond your team through writing and technical presentations.

• Support talent development within your team by offering feedback and guidance while leading by example.

⛳️ Requirements

• 8+ years of experience in designing, developing, and launching scalable backend systems using programming languages such as Python or Kotlin.

• Proven history of creating highly available distributed systems utilizing technologies like AWS, MySQL, Spark, and Kubernetes.

• Familiarity with a FinOps or cost-visibility platform (e.g., FinOut, CloudHealth, Kubecost, or a similar internal solution) — actively building dashboards, anomaly detection, or savings/waste reporting rather than merely using them.

• Experience in developing automation or tooling (Python, Terraform, or similar) that transforms a manual cost-review process into a scalable, self-service system — rather than conducting one-off analyses.

• Practical experience with cloud billing/cost data at scale (AWS Cost & Usage Reports, Snowflake, or similar warehouses) — proficient in writing complex SQL to model spending, allocate costs, and create unit-economics views from raw billing data.

• Experience in delivering significant features, system components, or deprecating existing functionalities within a system through the formulation of a technical and execution plan.

• Produce high-quality code that is clear and accessible for others to use.

• Flourish in ambiguous situations, and are adept at navigating from low-level language idioms to the architecture of large systems to comprehend their operation.

• Your growth and impact trajectory indicate mastery in gathering and iterating on feedback from your engineering and cross-functional peers.

• Exceptional verbal and written communication skills that facilitate effective collaboration with our global engineering team.

🏝️ Benefits

• Health care coverage - Affirm covers all premiums for all levels of coverage for you and your dependents.

• Flexible Spending Wallets - generous stipends for spending on Technology, Food, various Lifestyle needs, and family forming expenses.

• Time off - competitive vacation and holiday schedules allowing you to take time off to rest and recharge.

• ESPP - An employee stock purchase plan enabling you to buy shares of Affirm at a discount.