Manager, Software Engineering - Resilience Engineering

About Affirm

Affirm is transforming the traditional credit landscape by providing transparent and user-friendly credit solutions that enable consumers to purchase now and pay later without any hidden charges or compounding interest.

Role Overview

We are looking for an experienced Engineering Manager to lead our Resilience Engineering team. This role is essential for guaranteeing the security and reliability of our production systems through advanced proactive testing methods like production load testing and chaos engineering.

The successful candidate will head the creation of platforms and processes that allow safe experimentation on system behavior under stress and failure conditions in actual production environments, ensuring issues are identified and addressed before impacting our users.

Key Responsibilities

• Define and promote the strategic vision for resilience engineering at Affirm, emphasizing production load testing and chaos engineering as integral engineering practices.
• Lead, guide, and mentor a team focused on building tooling and platforms for secure production experimentation.
• Collaborate with infrastructure, product, and security leaders to integrate resilience validation within the software development lifecycle.
• Develop and enforce best practices for testing system boundaries and failure conditions safely in production environments.
• Design and oversee the evolution of infrastructure supporting controlled production load testing and fault injection experiments.
• Implement strong safeguards like isolation boundaries, approval processes, and automated rollbacks to protect actual users.
• Create systems supplying comprehensive observability, traceability, and audit capabilities for resilience testing.
• Drive improvements in reliability by systematically exposing weaknesses through testing and chaos engineering experiments.
• Set up monitoring, alert mechanisms, and incident response plans specialized for proactive resilience validation.
• Work closely with engineering teams to safely plan and perform production load tests and chaos experiments.
• Partner with infrastructure teams to establish guardrails and controls around resilience testing.
• Provide reusable tools, frameworks, and workflows to facilitate adoption of resilience practices across teams.
• Identify systemic vulnerabilities and spearhead cross-functional initiatives to enhance system reliability and fault tolerance.
• Champion a culture of proactively testing failures before they occur throughout the organization.

Qualifications and Skills

• Demonstrated experience leading teams focused on reliability, infrastructure, or distributed systems engineering.
• Direct experience with production load testing, chaos engineering, or validating large-scale systems.
• Familiarity with chaos engineering platforms like Gremlin or Harness.
• Strong knowledge of failure modes in distributed systems, including latency issues, partial failures, and cascading outages.
• Experience in designing or operating systems with rigorous safety measures such as isolation, rate limiting, guardrails, and auditing.
• Understanding of cloud-native technologies including AWS and Kubernetes, alongside observability tools.
• Proficiency in programming languages like Python, Kotlin, Java, or comparable languages.
• Exceptional problem-solving abilities with capacity to balance long-term resilience enhancements with immediate operational needs.
• Excellent communication and leadership capabilities with a proven record of influencing and advancing engineering practices across multiple teams.

Compensation and Benefits

This position corresponds to pay grade P and equity grade 7. Typically, new hires start at the lower end of the salary scale, which is transparently structured considering factors such as the employee's location, experience, and relevant skills.

The Canadian base salary range for this role is from 181000 to 241000 CAD annually.

Compensation includes a base salary plus possible monthly stipends for health, wellness, and technology. Benefits encompass fully-covered medical, dental, and vision insurance for employees and their dependents, along with potential equity awards from Affirm Holdings, Inc.

Work Location and Culture

Affirm operates as a remote-first company with most positions allowing employees to work from nearly anywhere within their country of employment. Some roles permit flexible remote work with occasional office presence, while certain functions remain office-based due to job requirements.

Additional Benefits

• Comprehensive health coverage including premiums for employees and families.
• Generous flexible spending accounts covering technology, food, lifestyle necessities, and family-related expenses.
• Competitive holiday and vacation policies to promote rest and recuperation.
• Employee Stock Purchase Plan offering discounted share purchases.

Diversity and Inclusion

Affirm is committed to inclusivity and provides reasonable accommodations for candidates requiring support throughout the hiring process. The company also complies with fair hiring initiatives concerning candidates with arrest and conviction records in applicable regions.

Privacy

Applicants acknowledge and consent to Affirm’s policies on data privacy regarding the handling of their personal information.