Senior Staff Software Engineer, Backend (Compute Platform)

Quick Facts

Senior Staff Software Engineer focused on backend compute platform infrastructure for a fleet of Amazon EKS clusters. Remote-first with flexibility built in.

Description

Join the Compute Platform team to architect and evolve Affirm’s EKS-based Kubernetes platform. You’ll drive fleet-scale automation for cluster provisioning and lifecycle, enforce workload safety standards, and improve reliability through observability and incident response.

Responsibilities

• Architect and evolve the EKS platform across cluster lifecycle, node management, and shared cluster components
• Lead technical direction for cluster provisioning, upgrades, and teardown using standardized Infrastructure as Code and self-service workflows
• Own reliability of shared components across the cluster fleet (e.g., Karpenter, CoreDNS, VPC CNI, Kube Proxy, Metrics Server) and the CI/CD pipeline delivering them
• Define and enforce EKS workload safety standards, including resource configuration, workload isolation/blast radius, disruption tolerance (PDBs), and consolidation strategies
• Build enforcement and automation to transition standards from onboarding to policy-enforced defaults for new workloads
• Establish observability baselines, audits, and reporting to identify hot spots and measure risk mitigation over time
• Partner with cluster-user teams to understand workload needs and shape platform capabilities
• Drive cost and capacity strategy via node scaling, bin packing, and EC2 instance selection
• Mentor engineers and set a high bar for operational excellence
• Participate in on-call: triage and catalogue runtime Kubernetes issues and collaborate on production incidents

Requirements

• 10+ years in software or infrastructure engineering with proven delivery of complex platform solutions
• 6+ years hands-on operating production Kubernetes at scale (ideally EKS on AWS)
• Strong AWS cloud-native architecture experience (EC2, VPC, IAM, EKS)
• Infrastructure-as-Code experience with Terraform (Spacelift preferred)
• Experience with GitOps or pipeline-driven delivery model (e.g., ArgoCD, kube-applier, or similar)
• Expert-level proficiency in Go or Python building production-grade Kubernetes controllers/operators/platform tooling
• Deep EKS and Kubernetes internals expertise (cluster upgrades, node lifecycle, scheduling, autoscaling such as Karpenter)
• Proven automation experience for Kubernetes operations at fleet scale, including self-healing remediation and policy-driven enforcement
• Strong grasp of workload reliability patterns (resource tuning, probes, PDBs, topology and isolation constraints)
• Experience designing and enforcing policy-based platform standards (e.g., OPA/Gatekeeper or equivalent)
• Observability instincts: define SLOs and build metrics/logs/alerting coverage; perform baseline audits
• Demonstrated technical leadership, mentorship, cross-functional influence, and excellent communication

Benefits

• Health coverage at no cost: 100% of premiums for employees and dependents
• Monthly stipends for tech setup and for health/wellness options
• Flexible time off and generous holiday calendars
• Employee Stock Purchase Plan (ESPP) to buy company stock at a discount
• Inclusive interview process with accommodations for candidates with disabilities