Senior Staff Software Engineer, Backend (Compute Platform)

About the Position

At Returnly, 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.

We are seeking a Senior Staff Software Engineer, Backend (Compute Platform) to join our dynamic team. This role is pivotal in building and maintaining our large-scale, highly-available, and global infrastructure that is shared across multiple financial products.

Responsibilities

As a member of the Compute Platform organization, you will collaborate with other teams to:

• Architect and evolve Affirm's EKS platform, driving strategy across cluster lifecycle, node management, and shared cluster components.
• Lead the technical direction for cluster provisioning, upgrades, and teardown through standardized IaC (Terraform, Spacelift) and self-service workflows.
• Own the reliability of core shared components across the fleet and the CI/CD pipeline that ships them consistently.
• Define and enforce EKS workload safety standards covering resource configuration, workload isolation, and disruption tolerance.
• Build the enforcement and automation path that moves each standard from research and white-glove onboarding through broad adoption to policy-enforced defaults for new workloads.
• Establish the observability, baseline audits, and reporting needed to identify hot spots and measure risk mitigation over time.
• Partner with cluster-user teams to understand workload needs and shape the platform accordingly.
• Drive cost and capacity strategy across node scaling, bin packing, and EC2 instance selection.
• Mentor engineers across the Compute Platform teams and set the bar for operational excellence.
• Participate in the on-call rotation, triage and catalogue runtime K8s issues, and collaborate with SRE on production incidents.

Requirements

• Deep EKS and Kubernetes internals expertise, including cluster upgrades, node lifecycle, scheduling, and autoscaling (Karpenter, Cluster Autoscaler).
• Demonstrated experience automating Kubernetes operations at fleet scale.
• Strong grasp of workload reliability patterns: resource tuning, probes, PDBs, topology, and isolation constraints.
• Experience designing and enforcing platform standards through policy and automated frameworks.
• Infrastructure as Code fluency with Terraform and a GitOps or pipeline-driven delivery model.
• Observability instincts: defining SLOs, building metrics, logs, and alerting coverage, and running data-driven baseline audits.
• Cross-functional collaboration skills with platform, product, SRE, and capacity teams.
• Demonstrated mentorship and technical leadership across teams.
• Drive to track emerging Kubernetes community best practices and adapt them to Returnly's needs.

Qualifications

• 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 cloud-native architecture experience on AWS (EC2, VPC, IAM, EKS).
• Experience with Infrastructure-as-Code (Terraform, Spacelift a plus) and GitOps-style deployment pipelines.
• Expert-level proficiency in Go or Python and a proven track record building production-grade Kubernetes controllers, operators, and platform tooling.
• Track record designing and enforcing standards across many teams without becoming a bottleneck.
• Exceptional problem-solving and systems-thinking skills.
• Demonstrated leadership and cross-functional influence.
• This position requires either equivalent practical experience or a Bachelor’s degree in a related field.

We Offer

• Competitive Salary: CAD 209k-269k / year + Equity
• Remote-first with flexibility: Most roles can be done from almost anywhere within Canada.
• Health coverage: 100% subsidized medical coverage, dental, and vision for you and your dependents.
• Spending stipends: Monthly stipends for health, wellness, and tech spending.
• Time off to recharge: Flexible time off and generous holiday calendars.
• Employee stock purchase plan (ESPP): Own a piece of what you build.

About the Company

Returnly is committed to providing an inclusive interview process, including accommodations for candidates with disabilities. If you need support, we’re happy to help.

For positions based in San Francisco or Los Angeles: Returnly considers qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records, as required by law.

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Ready to join our team? Apply now and be part of a company that values innovation, collaboration, and excellence.