Staff Software Engineer, Back-end (Identity Engineering)

About the Role

Join the Identity International team to accelerate Affirm's global expansion by shaping critical customer identity capabilities. This Staff Software Engineer role offers a unique opportunity to drive foundational processes at the intersection of technical depth, regulatory complexity, and cross-geo collaboration, directly influencing business growth and customer trust.

Responsibilities

• Set technical strategy for the team on a year-long time scale, tying it to critical, business-impacting projects.
• Collaborate across product management, design, and analytics to ensure technical sustainability, risks, and trade-offs are well understood and managed.
• Act as a force-multiplier for the team through the definition and advocacy of technical solutions and operational processes.
• Take ownership of the team’s operations and availability by ensuring proper monitoring, triage rotations, playbooks, policies, testing, and alerting are in place to support “keep the lights on” and on-call efforts.
• Foster a culture of quality and ownership by setting code review and design standards for the team, and advocating for them beyond the team through writing and tech talks.
• Help develop talent on the team by providing feedback and guidance, and leading by example.
• Participate in an on-call rotation as a requirement for this role.

Requirements

• 8+ years of experience designing, developing, and launching backend systems at scale.
• Proficiency in languages like Python or Kotlin.
• Extensive track record of developing highly available distributed systems using technologies such as AWS, MySQL, Spark, and Kubernetes.
• Strong verbal and written communication skills that support effective collaboration with a global engineering team.
• Experience delivering major features, system components, or deprecating existing functionality in a system through the definition of a technical and execution plan.
• Ability to write high-quality code that is easily understood and used by others.

About the Team

The Identity International team is newly established to accelerate Affirm’s international expansion, a top company priority. The team’s scope includes building and expanding Identity Data Management, Verification, and Decisioning capabilities for Europe, evaluating and integrating third-party KYC vendors, and ensuring alignment with global platform and operational standards.