About the Role
Affirm is building its own bank — and this role is one of the most senior individual-contributor seats on the engineering team that runs it. We're looking for a Staff Software Engineer to be a technical anchor for a deliberately small, AI-native team that owns the systems behind Affirm's bank: vendor-integrated banking infrastructure, the data platform, and the operational tooling that holds it all together. You'll set technical direction across that surface area, own the hardest problems on the team — including the Bank ↔ Affirm Inc integration boundary — and operate with direct exposure to senior bank and Affirm leadership.
This is a rare opportunity to shape a new business from its very first systems — a startup-like build inside an established company — at a level of ownership that goes beyond delivering your own projects. As a Staff engineer here you set the bar: the architecture, the standards, and the technical strategy that the rest of the team builds against. The team is small and AI-native, the surface area is broad, and the decisions you make carry far — every system you ship serves real customers under a real bank charter, and the patterns you establish determine what the bank becomes.
What You'll Do
- Set technical direction across the bank's systems. Own the medium-to-long-term technical strategy for the bank's core surfaces — cloud infrastructure, data platform, core banking configuration, CI/CD, networking, and the Bank ↔ Affirm Inc integration — and make the architecture calls the rest of the team builds against. Generalist breadth is expected; you go deep where the risk is highest.
- Own the hardest problems end-to-end. Personally design, build, integrate, and operate the most ambiguous and highest-stakes pieces of the stack, and own incident response for them. You take the problems no one else can fully scope and turn them into well-defined systems with clear failure domains, monitoring, and runbooks.
- Be the force multiplier on a small team. Set and hold the bar for code review, design review, and examiner-readable documentation. Establish the patterns and standards that let a deliberately small team punch far above its size, and level up every engineer who joins after you.
- Ship AI-first, and push the frontier of it. Treat AI tools and agentic workflows as a load-bearing capability for code, design review, runbook generation, and operations — and actively push yourself and the team on what an AI-leveraged engineering function can deliver in place of additional headcount.
- Lead vendor selection and ownership. Drive evaluation, integration, and ongoing oversight of the bank's third-party platforms across the core, data, identity, observability, and card-processing stacks. Carry the bank's most critical vendor relationships end-to-end: integration, operations, escalation, and audit.
- Define the integration boundary with Affirm Inc. Set the domain edges, data flows, and integration patterns between the bank and Affirm Inc so the bank's products work seamlessly inside the Affirm ecosystem while preserving the legal and regulatory separation the charter requires. Drive this across Affirm Inc engineering teams whose systems integrate with the bank's.
- Build for examiners. Partner with Legal, Compliance, Risk, BSA/AML, Finance, and Internal Audit so compliance is a property of the product from day one. The systems you design are the artifacts FDIC and state examiners will inspect — design and document them to a standard that holds up under examination and audit review.
- Own the operational posture of the bank's systems. Set the reliability, observability, alerting, runbook, incident-response, and disaster-recovery practices that keep the bank standalone-operable and audit-ready, while keeping the operational footprint intentionally small. You will support the operations and availability of your team’s artifacts by creating and monitoring metrics, escalating when needed, and supporting “keep the lights on” & on-call efforts.
- Influence up and across the organization. Communicate technical strategy, tradeoffs, and constraints with clarity to bank executives, the Bank Board, Compliance, Risk — and to engineers outside the bank across the broader Affirm org. The relationships you build beyond the team shape how cleanly the integration boundary works.
- Help grow the team and the bar. As engineers join, they inherit a function whose architecture, practices, and standards you helped set. Mentor peers, provide high-signal feedback, contribute to hiring, and lead by example.
What We Look For
- 8+ years of software engineering experience, with staff-level, hands-on builder credentials and a track record of owning ambiguous, high-stakes systems end-to-end through launch and operations
- Comfortable owning ambiguity at the largest scale on the team — you move fast, make the tough prioritization calls, take ownership before being asked, and balance speed with the engineering judgment the hardest decisions require
- Hungry to leverage AI to drive outcomes — fluent with AI-assisted development tools (Claude, Cursor, Codex, agentic workflows) and actively pushing yourself and your team to use them as a multiplier for code quality, velocity, and what a deliberately small team can ship
- Bias toward simplicity — experience building toward a small, lean engineering culture that rewards "buy over build", a default-deny posture, and standalone-operability over an abundance of tooling
- A track record of setting technical direction — you've defined architecture and multi-quarter technical strategy for systems beyond your own projects, and led the execution of it across engineers and teams without needing a management title to do so
- Deep systems thinking across public cloud infrastructure (AWS preferred), infrastructure-as-code (Terraform), and cloud data platforms (Snowflake or comparable) — you understand their failure modes and tradeoffs, not just their surface APIs
- Regulated-environment experience — direct work in banking, payments, securities, healthcare, or another setting subject to external examination, where the work involves examiner-facing documentation and decisions
- Direct experience selecting, integrating, and operating meaningful third-party platforms under operational ownership after launch
- Comfortable as the technical face of the work to non-engineering stakeholders — bank executives, the Board, Compliance, Risk, Finance, and examiners — and able to document decisions so they hold up under audit review
- Exceptional written and verbal communication — you can distill complex technical, regulatory, and operational concepts into clear narratives for executives, boards, and non-engineering audiences
- This position requires either equivalent practical experience or a Bachelor’s degree in a related field
Nice to have
- Prior work inside a bank, neobank, Banking-as-a-Service provider, card issuer/processor, or fintech with a chartered bank subsidiary
- Direct experience with a de novo bank launch, an early-stage bank buildout, or a greenfield regulated platform
- Hands-on experience with a bank core, card processing / issuer processor integration, or digital bank experience integration
- Hands-on experience standing up a greenfield cloud organization — fresh cloud org, IAM model, and data platform — under a tight, default-deny security posture
- Familiarity with the regulatory framework that shapes the work: FDIC examinations, GLBA / Reg P (affiliate data sharing), BSA/AML, Reg E, Reg DD, Reg Z, model risk, and third-party risk management
Compensation & Location
Base Pay Grade - P
Equity Grade - USA 13
Employees new to Affirm typically come in at the start of the pay range. Affirm focuses on providing a simple and transparent pay structure which is based on a variety of factors, including location, experience and job-related skills.
Base pay is part of a total compensation package that may include monthly stipends for health, wellness and tech spending, and benefits (including 100% subsidized medical coverage, dental and vision for you and your dependents). In addition, the employees may be eligible for equity rewards offered by Affirm Holdings, Inc. (parent company).
USA base pay range (CA, WA, NY, NJ, CT) per year: $230,000 - $290,000
USA base pay range (all other U.S. states) per year: $204,000 - $264,000
Benefits
- 100% employer-subsidized medical, dental, and vision coverage for employees and dependents
- Flexible spending wallets for technology, food, lifestyle, and family formation
- Competitive vacation and holiday schedules
- Employee Stock Purchase Plan