Senior Site Reliability Engineer

About the role

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. Site Reliability Engineering at Affirm is a small, yet crucial, team that helps our Engineering partners to "Operate What They Own" with excellence to protect their customers' experience. SRE accomplishes this through defining frameworks and best practices for operating applications, building tooling, and providing training and consulting. The role involves owning and delivering quarterly goals for your team, leading engineers on your team through ambiguity to solve open-ended problems, and ensuring that everyone is supported throughout delivery. You will support your peers and stakeholders in the product development lifecycle by collaborating with infrastructure, product management, developer experience & analytics by participating in ideation, articulating technical constraints, and partnering on decisions that properly consider risks and trade-offs. You will proactively identify technical solutions and operational processes that strengthen incident readiness, response, and post-incident analysis.

Key facts

What you'll do

You will be responsible for owning and delivering quarterly goals for your team, leading engineers on your team through ambiguity to solve open-ended problems, and ensuring that everyone is supported throughout delivery. You will support your peers and stakeholders in the product development lifecycle by collaborating with infrastructure, product management, developer experience & analytics by participating in ideation, articulating technical constraints, and partnering on decisions that properly consider risks and trade-offs. You will proactively identify technical solutions and operational processes that strengthen incident readiness, response, and post-incident analysis. 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. You will foster a culture of quality and ownership on your team by setting or improving 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. You will guide the development of SLOs and recommend observability and alerting configurations to ensure service reliability targets are met. You will drive the Incident Management and Analysis process and steer the implementation of Change Management and Deployment practices to enhance stability. You will engage in service and architectural conversations to influence long-term reliability and operational excellence across the platform.

Requirements

You have 4+ years of experience designing, developing and launching backend systems at scale using scripting and development languages like Bash, Python or Kotlin. You have a track record of developing highly available distributed systems using technologies like AWS, MySQL and Kubernetes. You have meaningful experience contributing in or driving parts of the Incident Lifecycle process, enabling actionable insights that improve the quality culture, reliability, resilience, and system performance. You have 4+ years working in a Site Reliability or Production Engineering team. You demonstrate curiosity with empathy, and strong opinions loosely held. You have experience defining a technical plan for the delivery of a significant feature or system component with an elegant, simple and extensible design. You write high quality code that is easily understood and used by others. Your experience demonstrates that you take ownership of your growth, proactively seeking feedback from your team, your manager, and your stakeholders. You have strong verbal and written communication skills that support effective collaboration with our global engineering team. You have experience in making impactful changes in a large code base, and have developed a suite of tools and practices that enable you and your team to do so safely.