### Who you are
- Deep EKS and Kubernetes internals expertise, including cluster upgrades, node lifecycle, scheduling, and autoscaling (Karpenter, Cluster Autoscaler)
- Demonstrated experience automating Kubernetes operations at fleet scale, from cluster provisioning, upgrades, and node lifecycle to self-healing remediation and policy-driven enforcement, replacing manual toil with auditable, self-service workflows
- Strong grasp of workload reliability patterns: resource tuning, probes, PDBs, topology, and isolation constraints
- Experience designing and enforcing platform standards through policy (admission control, OPA/Gatekeeper or equivalent) and automated frameworks
- Infrastructure as Code fluency with Terraform and a GitOps or pipeline-driven delivery model (ArgoCD, kube-applier, or similar)
- Observability instincts: defining SLOs, building metrics, logs, and alerting coverage, and running data-driven baseline audits
- Cross-functional collaboration skills with platform, product, SRE, and capacity teams
- Demonstrated mentorship and technical leadership across teams
- Drive to track emerging Kubernetes community best practices and adapt them to Affirm's needs
- 10+ years in software or infrastructure engineering with proven delivery of complex platform solutions
- 6+ years hands-on operating production Kubernetes at scale, ideally EKS on AWS
- Strong cloud-native architecture experience on AWS (EC2, VPC, IAM, EKS)
- Experience with Infrastructure-as-Code (Terraform, Spacelift a plus) and GitOps-style deployment pipelines
- Expert-level proficiency in Go or Python and a proven track record building production-grade Kubernetes controllers, operators, and platform tooling that other engineering teams depend on
- Track record designing and enforcing standards across many teams without becoming a bottleneck
- Exceptional problem-solving and systems-thinking skills
- Demonstrated leadership and cross-functional influence




- This position requires either equivalent practical experience or a Bachelor’s degree in a related field ### What the job involves
- Affirm's engineering team is building large-scale, highly available, global infrastructure shared across multiple financial products. The team values thorough technical design review, operational excellence, and capable incident response and analysis
- The Compute Platform team owns the EKS foundation that Affirm's products run on, from cluster provisioning and lifecycle through the safety standards that keep thousands of workloads reliable at scale. The team is responsible for making its fleet of 90+ EKS clusters standardized, automated, observable, and self-healing, while establishing and enforcing workload configuration standards that protect availability. Its mission is to provide a secure, reliable, and scalable Kubernetes platform that lets infrastructure and application teams deploy and operate with confidence and minimal operational friction
- As a member of the Compute Platform organization, collaborate with teams including Product, Infrastructure, Traffic, and Cost & Capacity Engineering
- Architect and evolve Affirm's EKS platform, driving strategy across cluster lifecycle, node management, and shared cluster components
- Lead the technical direction for cluster provisioning, upgrades, and teardown through standardized IaC (Terraform, Spacelift) and self-service workflows
- Own the reliability of core shared components across the fleet (Karpenter, CoreDNS, VPC CNI, Kube Proxy, Metrics Server, etc.) and the CI/CD pipeline that ships them consistently




- Define and enforce EKS workload safety standards covering resource configuration, workload isolation and blast radius, disruption tolerance (PDBs), and Karpenter consolidation strategies
- Build the enforcement and automation path that moves each standard from research and white-glove onboarding through broad adoption to policy-enforced defaults for new workloads
- Establish the observability, baseline audits, and reporting needed to identify hot spots and measure risk mitigation over time
- Partner with cluster-user teams (checkout, batch, ML, analytics, DevProd, etc.) to understand workload needs and shape the platform accordingly
- Drive cost and capacity strategy across node scaling, bin packing, and EC2 instance selection
- Mentor engineers across the Compute Platform teams and set the bar for operational excellence
- Participate in the on-call rotation, triage and catalogue runtime K8s issues, and collaborate with SRE on production incidents ### Perks
- Compensation: We have a simple, flexible, and transparent remote-first compensation structure so you can make the best decisions for yourself and your family
- Spending Wallets: Access tech, food, lifestyle, and family planning wallets for your expenses
- Supportive Communities: Get involved with our employee resource groups and community groups
- Remote-first Workforce: If your role is remote, you can set up shop anywhere in your home country
- Generous Time Off: Take the time you need when life happens
- Health

Benefits:
Get a plan that fits your needs
- Mental Healthcare: Take care of your mind with great mental health programs
- Parental Leave: Birth and non-birth parents get 18 weeks’ paid leave. Plus, a 4-week return-to-work transition program, at full base pay
- Away Days:

We offer
20 company-wide paid days off—which help our teams collectively pause to recharge
- Learning & Development: Engage in exciting learning programs to level up your growth

📌 Senior Staff Backend Engineer (Canada)
🏢 Affirm
📍 Canada