Staff Software Engineer, Backend (Identity International)

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.

Identity at Affirm is mission-critical; it is the very first step of the customer journey and the foundation of global expansion. The International Expansion Unit (IEU) owns Identity for every market outside North America, placing our team at the center of Affirm’s global strategy. We are responsible for ensuring Affirm can enter and scale in new markets while operating compliantly across diverse regulatory environments.

Our scope includes building and expanding Identity Data Management, KYC Verification, and Decisioning capabilities, while driving architectural changes that impact Identity services globally. We don’t just execute; we influence the core platform’s evolution to support new risk models and market dynamics. Operating at the intersection of technical depth and regulatory complexity, we directly impact approval rates, conversion, and fraud exposure. By joining this team, you will shape the foundational processes that unlock revenue and build customer trust on a global scale.

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 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, polcities, 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.

What We Look For

• You have 8+ years of experience designing, developing and launching backend systems at scale using languages like Python or Kotlin.
• You have an extensive track record of developing highly available distributed systems using technologies like AWS, MySQL, Spark and Kubernetes.
• 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.
• You thrive in amb