Staff Software Engineer, Backend (Recoveries)

At Affirm, we exist for the moments that matter—giving people a clear, predictable way to pay over time, with no hidden fees, no surprises, and no tradeoffs on what matters most.

The Recoveries team, part of Affirm’s Repayments area, builds the platform that determines the most effective way to recover value from charged-off loans while providing the best possible customer experience. We do this both by integrating with external recovery partners and by building our own customer-facing experiences that give customers flexible ways to resolve their outstanding balances.

Our systems span the full recoveries lifecycle, including loan placement and recall, partner integrations, payments and remittances, reconciliation, bankruptcy workflows, and customer-facing recovery experiences. Recoveries operates at the intersection of engineering, product, risk, analytics, operations, finance, legal, and compliance, and our systems directly impact recovery outcomes while requiring a high degree of correctness, reliability, and regulatory compliance.

We are looking for a Staff Software Engineer to help define the technical direction of the Recoveries platform as we scale our decisioning capabilities, expand internationally, strengthen our data integrity and reconciliation foundations, and build the next generation of recovery products.

What You'll Do

You will be responsible for setting technical strategy for your team on a year-long time scale, and help your team tie it together with critical, business-impacting projects.

You will help shape the evolution of the Recoveries platform, driving cross-team technical initiatives that optimize recovery strategies, enable flexible customer-facing experiences, and strengthen the reliability and scalability of our financial and partner integrations.

You will collaborate across teams in the product development lifecycle by collaborating with product management, design & analytics to ensure technical sustainability, risks and trade-offs are well understood and managed.

You will act as a force-multiplier for your team through your definition and advocacy of technical solutions and operational processes.

You take ownership of your team’s operations and availability by ensuring you have the right monitoring, triage rotations, playbooks, policies, testing and alerting in place to support “keep the lights on” & on-call efforts.

You will foster a culture of quality and ownership on your team by setting code review and design standards for your team, and advocating for them beyond your team through your writing and tech talks.

You will help develop talent on your team by providing feedback and guidance, and leading by example.

On-Call Rotation - There would be an on-call rotation for this role as a requirement.

What we look for

You have a total of 8+ years of experience as a software engineer.

You are proficient in designing, developing and launching backend systems at scale technologies like Python, Kotlin, AWS, MySQL, and Kubernetes

You have experience designing and operating correctness-sensitive batch, asynchronous, or data-processing systems, including scheduled workflows, backfills, reconciliation, observability, and robust failure handling.

You have experience architecting solutions across complex systems and organizational boundaries, and are comfortable understanding and driving changes outside your immediate area of ownership—including across backend services and customer-facing applications—to deliver end-to-end outcomes.

You have experience delivering major features, system components or deprecating existing functionality in a system through the definition of a technical and execution plan. You write high quality code that is easily understood and used by others.