Software Engineer II, Backend Identity Decisioning
Affirm
Job Overview
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Job Description
About Affirm
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.
Identity Engineering owns the systems responsible for onboarding all consumers and managing their authentication and verification journeys across Affirm’s product surfaces. In this role, you will need to gain a deep understanding of the business, product and engineering context, and utilize that context to own and deliver high-availability and low-latency systems on the critical paths for all of our products.
What You'll Do
- With the support of your team’s tech lead and manager, you will break down larger projects into individual tasks, deliver them in multiple phases, and collaborate with others to ensure timely delivery of your work.
- You will support your peers and stakeholders in the product development lifecycle by collaborating with product management, design & analytics by participating in ideation, articulating technical constraints, and partnering on decisions that properly consider risks and trade-offs.
- 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 contribute to a sense of community on your team by engaging in growth and development activities such as participation in the interview process.
What We Look For
- You have a total of 1.5+ years of experience as a software engineer.
- You have experience designing, developing and launching backend systems and are proficient in one of Python or Kotlin.
- You are familiar with the building blocks of distributed systems, and the technologies like AWS, MySQL and Kubernetes.
- You have mastered taking a simple problem or business scenario into a solution that interacts with multiple software components, and executing on it by writing clear, easily understood, well tested and extensible code.
- You are comfortable navigating a large code base, debugging others' code, and providing feedback to other engineers through code reviews.
- 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.
Benefits
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:
- 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
Key skills/competency
- Backend Development
- Distributed Systems
- Python
- Kotlin
- AWS
- MySQL
- Kubernetes
- API Design
- System Architecture
- Code Review
- Authentication
How to Get Hired at Affirm
- Research Affirm's culture: Study their mission, values, recent news, and employee testimonials on LinkedIn and Glassdoor.
- Tailor Your Resume: Customize your resume and cover letter to highlight experience in backend engineering, distributed systems, and identity solutions, using keywords from the Software Engineer II, Backend Identity Decisioning job description.
- Showcase Technical Skills: Prepare to discuss your proficiency in Python or Kotlin, experience with AWS, MySQL, and Kubernetes, and your approach to building high-availability, low-latency systems.
- Practice Behavioral Questions: Affirm values collaboration and ownership; be ready to share examples of teamwork, problem-solving, and proactive growth in past engineering roles.
- Understand Affirm's Product: Familiarize yourself with Affirm's "buy now, pay later" model and how identity decisioning is crucial to their financial services.
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