Manager, Software Engineering - Developer Environments

About Affirm and the Developer Productivity Team

Affirm is transforming credit by offering transparent and friendly payment options without hidden fees or compounding interest. The Developer Productivity team’s mission is to enhance engineer workflows at Affirm, focusing on simplifying and speeding up software development processes. This team manages everything from developer laptops to production systems, including ephemeral developer environments, CI/CD pipelines, test automation frameworks, dependency management, and release engineering, supporting over 800 engineers across a complex technology stack in a fast-growing financial technology company.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead the Developer Environments team that builds fast, reliable developer environments for feature creation, testing, and debugging used in development and CI workflows.
• Define and execute the vision and multi-year technical strategy for Developer Environments aligned with critical business goals.
• Mentor and lead engineers by fostering ownership, collaboration, and technical excellence within the team culture.
• Collaborate closely with CI/CD, infrastructure, security, and product teams to align priorities and ensure integrated solutions.
• Oversee the design, scalability, usability, and reliability of ephemeral development environment systems.
• Enhance environment provisioning, stability, performance, and efficient teardown to improve developer velocity and reliability.
• Implement monitoring, alerting, incident response plans, and operational playbooks to reduce downtime and minimize developer disruption.
• Work cross-functionally to improve developer productivity by identifying pain points and initiating tooling, automation, and self-service improvements.
• Ensure adoption of best practices in code review, design standards, quality, and ownership across the team and broader engineering groups.

Candidate Profile and Requirements

• Minimum 7 years of software engineering experience with at least 2 years in leadership or engineering management roles.
• Experience leading engineering teams in infrastructure, platform engineering, developer productivity, or related areas.
• Strong technical expertise in backend or infrastructure engineering; Python or Kotlin knowledge is preferred but not mandatory.
• Experience building and managing cloud-native systems using AWS and Kubernetes, and infrastructure as code methodologies.
• Practical experience with containerized environments (Docker, Kubernetes) and CI/CD platforms like Buildkite, Jenkins, or GitHub Actions.
• Proven history managing highly reliable services, including monitoring, incident response, on-call duties, and continuous service improvement.
• Excellent communication and leadership capabilities with a track record of mentoring high-performing teams.
• Ability to navigate trade-offs between build vs. buy decisions, speed vs. safety, and developer experience vs. operational demands.
• Equivalent practical experience or a Bachelor’s degree in a relevant field is required.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience managing ephemeral or remote development environments.
• Expertise optimizing orchestration and startup times and enhancing developer feedback mechanisms.
• Background in test automation, build engineering, or developer tooling.
• Familiarity with infrastructure management tools such as Terraform or Helm.

Compensation and Benefits

Base salary for this role ranges from $181,000 to $241,000 per year in Canada, with new hires typically starting at the lower end of the range. Affirm’s total compensation package may include monthly stipends for health, wellness, and technology, alongside 100% subsidized medical, dental, and vision coverage for employees and dependents. Employees may also be eligible for equity awards through the parent company.

Affirm embraces a remote-first work culture with most positions allowing flexibility to work from almost anywhere within the country of employment. Some roles may occasionally require presence at an assigned office.

Additional Benefits

• Comprehensive healthcare coverage with premiums fully paid for you and your dependents.
• Flexible spending accounts providing generous stipends for technology, food, lifestyle needs, and family forming expenses.
• Competitive time-off policies including vacation and holidays to support rest and recharging.
• Employee Stock Purchase Plan offering discounted shares of Affirm.

Equal Opportunity and Accessibility

Affirm is committed to providing an inclusive hiring process and is prepared to offer reasonable accommodations for candidates with disabilities. Candidates in jurisdictions with fair chance hiring laws will also be considered without bias based on arrest or conviction records.

Applicants acknowledge Affirm’s privacy policies concerning the collection and processing of personal information by submitting their applications.