Manager of Software Engineering, Affirm

• 7+ years of software engineering experience, with 2+ years of engineering management experience (or equivalent people leadership experience)
• Proven experience leading engineering teams in infrastructure, platform engineering, developer productivity, or adjacent domains
• Strong technical background in backend/infrastructure systems (Python or Kotlin preferred, but not required) and the ability to guide architecture and execution
• Experience building and operating cloud-native systems (AWS, Kubernetes) and using infrastructure-as-code practices
• Hands-on familiarity with containerized environments (Docker/Kubernetes) and CI/CD systems (e.g., Buildkite, Jenkins, GitHub Actions)
• Track record of operating services with a high reliability bar (monitoring, on-call, incident response, postmortems, continuous hardening)
• Strong communication and leadership skills, with a track record of mentoring and growing high-performing teams
• Comfort balancing trade-offs between build vs. buy, speed vs. safety, and developer experience vs. operational constraints
• This position requires either equivalent practical experience or a Bachelor’s degree in a related field

Desirable

• Developer Productivity exists to make work better for every engineer at Affirm
• Our mission is to simplify and accelerate software development across the company
• We own the entire space between a developer’s laptop and production, including ephemeral dev environments, CI/CD pipelines, test automation frameworks, dependency management, and release engineering
• Our tools and platforms enable engineers to ship code quickly, safely, and with confidence
• This org supports 800+ engineers working across a broad stack in a hypergrowth FinTech environment—a complex, high‑leverage challenge with impact at scale
• The Developer Environments team builds fast, stable developer environments that make it easy for Affirm engineers to create, test, and debug their features
• We own Affirm’s ephemeral development environments, used across both development and CI workflows
• We’re seeking a seasoned Engineering Manager to lead Developer Environments
• This role is critical to the end-to-end inner loop experience for engineers
• You will lead the team building and operating the platforms that support environment provisioning, test execution, and automated developer infrastructure—partnering closely with CI/CD, infrastructure, security, and product engineering teams
• Leadership & Strategy
• Define and drive the vision for Developer Environments and inner-loop developer productivity at Affirm
• Set technical strategy for your team on a year-long time scale, and tie it to critical, business-impacting projects
• Lead and mentor a team of engineers, fostering a culture of ownership, collaboration, and technical excellence
• Partner with engineering leadership and stakeholders to align Developer Environments priorities with broader product, platform, and reliability goals
• Systems & Operations
• Own the design, scalability, reliability, and usability of the systems powering Affirm’s ephemeral developer environments used in both development and CI contexts
• Improve environment provisioning, stability, and teardown workflows to enhance developer velocity and reliability
• Drive measurable improvements to the developer journey (e.g., startup time, success rate, performance, debuggability, resource utilization)
• Implement monitoring, alerting, incident response processes, and operational playbooks to minimize downtime and developer impact
• Collaborate with CI/CD and Test Platform partners to tighten feedback loops and ensure environments integrate cleanly with build/test workflows
• Collaboration & Enablement
• Work closely across engineering to ensure smooth adoption of Developer Environments tooling and best practices
• Identify developer pain points and lead initiatives to improve productivity through tooling, automation, and self-service
• Foster a culture of quality and ownership on your team by setting and improving code review and design standards, and advocating for them beyond your team through writing and knowledge sharing