Staff Software Engineer, Backend (Cost Engineering)

About the Position

Staff Software Engineer, Backend (Cost Engineering)

Remote Canada

Affirm is reinventing credit to make it more honest and friendly, giving consumers the flexibility to buy now and pay later without any hidden fees or compounding interest.

Engineering owns cost visibility and optimization across Affirm's cloud and AI infrastructure. We're the team that tells the business what it's spending, why it's changing, and what to do about it - from AWS resource waste and tagging strategy to the newer frontier of AI/LLM spend across the company's growing set of AI tools. We treat cost anomalies with the same rigor as production incidents: we've built a severity framework (mirroring Affirm's SEV0–3 incident model but mapped to dollar impact) with defined detection sources, TTD/TTR metrics, and escalation paths, and we operate a clear RACI with partner orgs - we own visibility and alerting, and partner teams own remediation (at times we may dig in deep and own remediation too!), so accountability never gets diffuse.

As a Staff Cost Engineer, you'll operate at the intersection of finance, infrastructure, and data engineering - designing the tooling, automation, and processes that scale cost governance across a fast-growing multi-cloud and multi-AI-vendor footprint. You'll set technical direction for the team, influence cost strategy with infra and platform leaders across the org, and turn ambiguous "why did spend spike" questions into durable systems and self-service tooling. We're a small, high-leverage team - you'll have outsized influence on how Affirm thinks about cost.

Responsibilities

• Set technical strategy for your team on a year-long time scale, and help your team tie it together with critical, business-impacting projects.
• 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.
• Act as a force-multiplier for your team through your definition and advocacy of technical solutions and operational processes.
• 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.
• 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.
• Help develop talent on your team by providing feedback and guidance, and leading by example.

Requirements

• 8+ years of experience designing, developing, and launching backend systems at scale using languages like Python or Kotlin.
• Extensive track record of developing highly available distributed systems using technologies like AWS, MySQL, Spark, and Kubernetes.
• Experience with a FinOps or cost-visibility platform (e.g., FinOut, CloudHealth, Kubecost, or an internal equivalent) - building dashboards, anomaly detection, or savings/waste reporting rather than just consuming them.
• Track record of building automation or tooling (Python, Terraform, or similar) that turns a manual cost-review process into a scalable, self-service system - not just one-off analysis.
• Hands-on experience with cloud billing/cost data at scale (AWS Cost & Usage Reports, Snowflake, or similar warehouses) - comfortable writing complex SQL to model spend, allocate cost, and build unit-economics views from raw billing data.
• Experience delivering major features, system components, or deprecating existing functionality in a system through the definition of a technical and execution plan. Write high-quality code that is easily understood and used by others.
• Thrive in ambiguity, and are comfortable moving from low-level language idioms all the way to the architecture of large systems to understand how they work.
• Demonstrate a growth and impact trajectory that shows you have mastered gathering and iterating on feedback from your engineering and cross-functional peers.
• Strong verbal and written communication skills that support effective collaboration with our global engineering team.

We Offer

• Competitive Salary: CAD $181,000 - $241,000 per year.
• Equity Rewards: Eligible for equity rewards offered by Affirm Holdings, Inc. (parent company).
• 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.

About the Company

Affirm is proud to be a remote-first company! The majority of our roles are remote and you can work almost anywhere within the country of employment. Affirmers in proximal roles have the flexibility to work remotely, but will occasionally be required to work out of their assigned Affirm office. A limited number of roles remain office-based due to the nature of their job responsibilities.

We’re extremely proud to offer competitive benefits that are anchored to our core value of people come first. Some key highlights of our benefits package include:

• Inclusive Interview Experience: We’re happy to provide reasonable accommodations to candidates in need of individualized support during the hiring process.
• Fair Chance Hiring: Pursuant to the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance and Los Angeles Fair Chance Initiative for Hiring Ordinance, Affirm will consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records.

By clicking "Submit Application," you acknowledge that you have read Affirm's Global Candidate Privacy Notice and hereby freely and unambiguously give informed consent to the collection, processing, use, and storage of your personal information as described therein.