Manager, Software Engineering - Resilience Engineering

About the Role

At Affirm, our mission supports significant moments in people's lives by providing a transparent and predictable payment solution without hidden fees or surprises. We are looking for an experienced Engineering Manager to oversee our Resilience Engineering team. This pivotal role focuses on safeguarding the dependability and security of our production environments by employing proactive validation techniques including production load testing and chaos engineering.

Key Responsibilities

• Establish and champion Affirm's vision for resilience engineering, prioritizing production load testing and chaos engineering as integral engineering practices.
• Lead and develop a team of engineers responsible for creating platforms and tools to safely conduct production experiments.
• Collaborate closely with leadership across infrastructure, product, and security to integrate resilience validation seamlessly into the software development lifecycle.
• Create and enforce best practices for safely evaluating system limitations and failure scenarios directly in production.
• Design and oversee platforms that facilitate controlled, secure production load testing and fault injection procedures.
• Implement robust safety measures including isolation boundaries, structured approval workflows, and automated rollback mechanisms to ensure user protection.
• Develop comprehensive systems offering observability, traceability, and audit capabilities for all resilience-focused experiments.
• Identify system vulnerabilities through load testing and chaos experiments to drive ongoing reliability enhancements.
• Set up specialized monitoring, alerting, and incident response processes tailored for proactive resilience assessments.
• Partner with engineering teams to plan and safely execute production load tests and chaos experiments.
• Coordinate with infrastructure teams to build safeguards around testing and experimentation activities.
• Provide reusable tools, frameworks, and standardized workflows to empower teams adopting resilience engineering practices.
• Lead cross-functional initiatives to address systemic weaknesses and bolster overall reliability and fault tolerance.
• Promote a culture that embraces testing failures prior to them manifesting in production environments.

Qualifications

• Demonstrated leadership experience managing engineering teams focused on reliability, infrastructure, or distributed systems.
• Practical expertise with production load testing, chaos engineering, or validating large-scale systems.
• Hands-on experience utilizing chaos engineering platforms such as Gremlin, Harness, or similar tools.
• In-depth knowledge of failure modes that occur in distributed systems including latency, partial outages, and cascading failures.
• Experience architecting or maintaining systems with strong safety measures like isolation, rate limiting, guardrails, and audit trails.
• Familiarity with cloud-native platforms such as AWS and Kubernetes alongside observability technologies.
• Proficient programming skills in languages such as Python, Kotlin, Java, or equivalent.
• Strong analytical abilities with capacity to align resilience improvements with both long-term strategies and immediate business demands.
• Excellent communication and leadership capabilities, able to influence best practices across diverse engineering teams.

Compensation and Benefits

This position is a currently open role classified under Pay Grade P and Equity Grade 7. Typically, new hires begin at the lower end of the pay scale, which ranges from CAD 181,000 to CAD 241,000 annually. Total compensation includes base salary, monthly stipends allocated for health, wellness, and technology needs, and comprehensive benefits including fully subsidized medical, dental, and vision coverage for employees and their dependents. Eligible employees may also participate in equity programs offered by Affirm Holdings, Inc.

Work Environment

Affirm operates a remote-first policy, granting employees the flexibility to work from nearly anywhere within their country of employment. Some roles may require occasional on-site presence, and new employees will attend an in-person onboarding event.

Additional Information

• We provide a benefits package designed to support your health and work-life balance, including fully covered health insurance premiums, monthly stipends to support your tech setup and wellness choices, flexible time off policies, and an employee stock purchase plan to invest in our company.
• We are committed to an inclusive interview process and offer reasonable accommodations for candidates with disabilities.
• For roles based in specific locations such as San Francisco or Los Angeles, Affirm complies with laws related to considering applicants with arrest and conviction histories as part of our hiring process.
• Applicants must consent to Affirm's Global Candidate Privacy Notice regarding the processing of personal information.