--- title: 'Senior Software Engineer, Backend (AI Platform) at Affirm' canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/senior-software-engineer-backend-ai-platform-affirm-canada-hsv6e5g55n94' type: 'job' last_seen: '2026-11-01' --- # Senior Software Engineer, Backend (AI Platform) at Affirm - **Company:** Affirm - **Location:** Canada - **Work type:** remote - **Posted:** 2026-10-30 - **Last confirmed live:** 2026-11-01 - **Apply:** https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/affirm/jobs/8040388003 ## Job description 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. Affirm's engineering team is building a large-scale, fault-tolerant, and global infrastructure that is shared across multiple financial products, merchants, and vendors. Ensuring that our infrastructure is transparently available to all engineers is critical to the success of the business. We pride ourselves on our culture across engineering of writing blameless postmortems as well as writing detailed tech specs and gathering feedback before large changes to systems. The AI Platform team owns Affirm's paved path for building, running, evaluating, and governing AI systems. Our customers are not only Affirm users, but also every engineer and a growing set of production workloads at Affirm. As a team, we are responsible for building and exposing simple, governed interfaces to models, tools, and agents, with identity, cost attribution, reliability, and security built in. Examples of components we own include the LLM Gateway that fronts every approved model (Claude, ChatGPT, and open-weight models across AWS Bedrock and other providers), the MCP Gateway that mediates and audits tool calls, the Agent Runtime that gives agentic workloads bounded execution, and the evals and observability layer that tells teams whether an AI change is better, cheaper, or safe to ship. We are early: the gateway is in daily use across engineering, the first production agent is live, and the next year takes us from developer productivity to production inference and agents. ## What You'll Do - Plan, execute, and own technical decisions and projects within the AI Platform team, from design through launch and on-call. - Design and build the gateway, runtime, and evaluation services that take AI workloads at Affirm from pilot to production, securely scaling across millions of users and their transactions. - Make AI spend attributable and governable: build the identity, quota, routing, caching, and failover controls that let teams adopt new models and tools without re-solving the same platform problems. - Partner with security, infrastructure, and product engineering teams to set the guardrails for agentic workloads and the on-behalf-of identity model for tool access. - Create and monitor metrics for your team's systems, and own the operational health of what you ship: monitoring, alerting, runbooks, and on-call. - Set and improve code review and design standards, and advocate for them beyond your team through writing and tech talks. - Use AI tools and agentic workflows every day as a multiplier for your own code, design review, and operations, and push the team on what a small AI-native team can deliver. - Educate, mentor, and grow engineers in the team, and drive best practices around design, coding, and testing. ## What We Look For - You have 4+ years of experience designing, developing and launching backend systems at scale using languages like Python or Kotlin. - You have a track record of developing highly available distributed systems using technologies like AWS, MySQL and Kubernetes. - You have practical experience building with LLMs, agents, or AI frameworks in production: inference APIs, LLM gateways (LiteLLM or similar), MCP, tool calling, evals, or agent runtimes. - You understand AI usage and the infrastructure needed to support and leverage AI workloads across different disciplines. - 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. - You are proficient at making significant 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. - 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. - This position requires either equivalent practical experience or a Bachelor’s degree in a related field. This remote role is open only to candidates residing in Alberta, British Columbia, Manitoba, New Brunswick, Newfoundland and Labrador, Nova Scotia, Ontario, Prince Edward Island, or Saskatchewan Pay Grade - N Equity Grade - 6 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 equity rewards, monthly stipends for health, wellness and tech spending, and benefits (including 100% subsidized medical coverage, dental and vision for you and your dependents.) CAN base pay range per year: $153,000 - $213,000 CAD #LI-Remote Remote-first with flexibility built in Affirm is proud to be a remote-first company. Most roles can be done from almost anywhere within the country of employment. Some positions may occasionally require in-person work at an Affirm office, and a few are office-based due to the nature of the work. All new hires will be invited to attend an in-person onboarding experience. ## Benefits designed for you Our benefits reflect our commitment to care, transparency, and flexibility. Here are a few highlights: - Health coverage at no cost: We cover 100% of premiums for employees and their dependents. - Spending stipends: Monthly stipends support your tech setup, and the ability to choose health and wellness options that are right for you. - Time off to recharge: Flexible time off and generous holiday calendars help you rest when you need to. - Own a piece of what you build: Our employee stock purchase plan (ESPP) lets you buy Affirm stock at a discount. We’re 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: Affirm considers qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records, as required by law. By clicking "Submit Application," you acknowledge that you have read Affirm's [Global Candidate Privacy Notice](https://www.affirm.com/global-candidate-privacy-notice) and consent to the use of your personal information as described. ## About Affirm ## Company Overview - **One-liner**: Affirm is a financial technology company that offers transparent, flexible buy now, pay later (BNPL) installment loans, a debit card, and a savings account, enabling consumers to pay over time without hidden fees. - **Entity Type**: Public (NASDAQ: AFRM) - **Headquarters**: San Francisco, California, United States - **Founded**: 2012 - **Founders**: Max Levchin, Nathan Gettings, Jeffrey Kaditz, Alex Rampell ## Core Business - **Primary industry**: Financial services – point-of-sale lending, digital payments, consumer banking. - **Target customers**: B2C (consumers seeking flexible payment options) and B2B (merchants of all sizes, from SMBs to enterprise retailers). - **Mission or purpose statement**: To deliver honest financial products that improve lives, offering transparency with no late fees or hidden charges. ## Products & Services - **Adaptive Checkout**: An AI-powered checkout flow that optimizes payment options for each consumer. - **AdaptAI**: A suite of AI tools for merchants to personalize offers and manage risk. - **BoostAI**: An AI-driven feature that dynamically adjusts installment terms to increase approval rates. - **Split Pay**: A BNPL product that lets consumers split purchases into biweekly payments. - **Affirm Card**: A Visa debit card that allows cardholders to pay over time at any merchant that accepts Visa. - **Affirm Money Account**: A high-yield savings account and debit card, held with Cross River Bank, Member FDIC. ## Market Standing - **Valuation/Market Cap**: USD 5.17 billion (as of July 2026) - **Key Metric**: Annual Revenue – USD 3.22 billion (trailing twelve months as of Q3 FY2026). Total funding raised (including debt financing) – USD 9.57 billion. - **Notable Investors/Partners**: Partners include Bed Bath & Beyond, Royal Caribbean, Stripe (UK), Google, Costco, and Backcountry. Investors include Morgan Stanley, Sixth Street, and CPP Investments. - **Growth Signals**: Nearly 27 million active consumers, 515,000 active merchants, and over $46 billion in Gross Merchandise Volume (LTM as of March 31, 2026). Revenue grew to $3.22B, and the company achieved positive net income of $52M in FY2025. Headcount increased 1.1% YoY to 2,132 employees, with active job postings up 103.8% year-over-year. ## Competitive Advantages - **Transparency-first model**: No late fees, no compounding interest – a key differentiator in the BNPL space. - **Machine learning underwriting**: Proprietary risk models that evaluate each transaction in real-time, reducing defaults while maintaining high approval rates. - **Large merchant network**: 515,000+ active merchants, including major retailers, providing broad consumer reach. - **Integrated ecosystem**: The Affirm Card and Money Account create a sticky financial platform beyond just checkout loans. ## Strategic Focus - **International expansion**: Currently operating in the U.S., Canada, and the UK, with recent partnerships (e.g., Stripe in UK, Royal Caribbean in UK/Canada) signaling further global growth. - **AI & personalization**: Continued investment in AI tools (AdaptAI, BoostAI) to improve merchant conversion and consumer experience. - **Affirm Card growth**: Driving adoption of the card as a daily payment method, with 4.4 million card active consumers. - **Capital partnerships**: Renewing and expanding capital partnerships (e.g., CPP Investments) to fund loan origination. ## Why Work Here - **Remote-first culture**: Most roles are remote within the employee’s home country, with a simple, transparent compensation structure. - **Generous benefits**: 18 weeks of paid parental leave for birth and non-birth parents, plus a 4-week return-to-work transition at full pay. 20 company-wide paid days off (“Away Days”) to collectively recharge. Flexible time off, mental healthcare programs, and “spending wallets” for tech, food, lifestyle, and family planning. - **Learning & development**: Exciting learning programs to level up growth. - **Employee community**: Active employee resource groups and supportive communities. - **Compensation**: Transparent, flexible, remote-first structure. Example: Senior Software Engineer median salary ~$207,029/year. - **Workplace ratings**: 3.8/5 on LinkedIn (638 reviews), with compensation rated 4.4/5, culture 3.6/5, and work-life balance 3.6/5. - **Engineering culture**: Heavy technical team (29% of workforce in engineering/technical roles), with strong talent from PayPal, Amazon, Google, and Stripe. ## Sources 1. [affirm.com/careers](https://www.affirm.com/careers) 2. [linkedin.com/company/affirm](https://www.linkedin.com/company/affirm) 3. 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