Manager, Software Engineering - Resilience Engineering

About the Role

Affirm aims to transform credit into a more transparent and consumer-friendly service, offering flexible buy now, pay later options without hidden fees or compounded interest. We are seeking an experienced Engineering Manager to lead our Resilience Engineering team, focusing on safeguarding our production systems by employing proactive validation methods like production load testing and chaos engineering.

Key Responsibilities

• Define and implement the vision for resilience engineering at Affirm, making production load testing and chaos engineering key pillars of the engineering approach.
• Manage and guide a team of engineers tasked with creating platforms and tools for conducting safe experiments in production environments.
• Collaborate with leadership across infrastructure, product, and security to integrate resilience validation seamlessly throughout the software development lifecycle.
• Develop and maintain best practices for safely testing system limits and simulating failures in production settings.
• Oversee the design and advancement of platforms facilitating controlled and secure production load tests and fault injections.
• Institute stringent safeguards such as isolation boundaries, approval processes, and automated rollbacks to protect end-users.
• Create systems that offer comprehensive observability, traceability, and auditability for all resilience testing.
• Lead efforts to improve system reliability by uncovering weaknesses through load testing and chaos experiments.
• Implement tailored monitoring, alerting, and incident response frameworks to support proactive resilience validation.
• Partner with engineering teams to safely plan and execute production load and chaos tests.
• Work alongside infrastructure teams to build protective guardrails around testing activities.
• Provide reusable tooling, frameworks, and standardized workflows to empower teams adopting resilience practices.
• Identify and address systemic vulnerabilities by spearheading cross-functional initiatives to enhance reliability and fault tolerance.
• Promote an organizational culture that encourages testing failure scenarios before they impact users.

Qualifications

• Proven leadership experience managing engineering teams in fields such as reliability, infrastructure, or distributed systems.
• Direct involvement with production load testing, chaos engineering, or validating large-scale systems.
• Experience using chaos engineering platforms like Gremlin, Harness, or comparable tools.
• Solid understanding of failure modes in distributed systems, including latency issues, partial failures, and cascading outages.
• Background in building or maintaining systems with strict safety controls such as isolation, rate limiting, guardrails, and auditability.
• Comfortable working with cloud-native technologies including AWS and Kubernetes and knowledgeable about observability tools.
• Strong programming skills in languages such as Python, Kotlin, Java, or equivalents.
• Excellent analytical skills to balance long-term resilience strategies with immediate business requirements.
• Effective communicator and leader capable of influencing engineering practices across multiple teams.

Additional Information

• This vacancy is currently open and actively recruiting.
• Position pay grade: P; equity grade: 7.
• Base salary range in Canada: 181000 to 241000 CAD annually.
• Affirm provides a straightforward, transparent compensation structure based on location, prior experience, and skills.
• Compensation package may include stipends for health, wellness, and technology expenses.
• Benefits include fully covered medical, dental, and vision insurance for employees and dependents.
• Opportunity for equity rewards through Affirm Holdings, Inc.
• Affirm operates as a remote-first company allowing work nearly anywhere within the country of employment, with occasional on-site requirements for some roles.
• Key benefits include comprehensive health coverage with all premiums covered, generous stipends for technology, food, lifestyle, and family formation needs, competitive vacation and holiday allowances, and an employee stock purchase plan offering discounted shares.
• Affirm is committed to an inclusive hiring process and provides accommodations for candidates with disabilities upon request.
• Compliance with relevant fair chance employment ordinances in select U.S. locations.
• Applicants' personal data is handled in accordance with Affirm's Global Candidate Privacy Notice, with informed consent provided upon application.