At affirm, we exist for the moments that matter- giving people a transparent, predictable way to pay over time with no hidden fees, no surprises, and no trade-offs.

Affirm's Compute Platform team owns the

Amazon EKS foundation

powering thousands of workloads across 90+ production EKS clusters in multiple environments and regions. As a

Senior Staff Software Engineer on the Compute Platform team , you will define the technical vision, fleet automation roadmap, and workload safety standards for affirm's entire container platform. In this high-leverage technical leadership role, you will architect standardized cluster lifecycle tools ( Terraform, Spacelift, ArgoCD ), build custom Kubernetes controllers/operators ( Go, Python ), establish Karpenter autoscaling strategies, and enforce policy controls ( OPA/Gatekeeper ) across engineering teams.

Key Responsibilities

EKS Fleet Strategy & Architecture:

Architect and evolve Affirms EKS ecosystem across 90+ production clusters, driving long-term strategy for cluster lifecycle, node provisioning, and shared cluster components.

Infrastructure as Code (IaC) & Automation:

Drive automated cluster provisioning, zero-downtime upgrades, and teardown using standardized Terraform, Spacelift, and GitOps pipelines ( ArgoCD, kube-applier ).

Core Fleet Component Ownership:

Own the reliability, testing, and automated delivery pipelines for shared cluster infrastructure, including

Karpenter, CoreDNS, VPC CNI, Kube-Proxy , and Metrics Server.

Workload Safety & Policy Enforcement:

Define and automate EKS workload safety standards—covering resource requests/limits, disruption budgets ( PDBs ), blast radius isolation, and admission policy enforcement ( OPA/Gatekeeper ).

Custom Controller & Operator Development:

Build production-grade, custom Kubernetes controllers, operators, and platform tooling ( Go or Python ) that streamline developer workflows.

Observability & Cost Strategy:

Establish platform SLOs,



baseline security/capacity audits, and data-driven cost optimization frameworks across EC2 node bin-packing and Karpenter consolidation.

Technical Mentorship & On-Call Leadership:

Mentor engineers across Compute Platform pods, participate in on-call escalations, and lead incident post-mortems alongside SRE teams.

Requirements Kubernetes Fleet & Platform Engineering Depth

10+ years

of professional software or infrastructure engineering experience with a track record of delivering complex, enterprise-scale platform solutions.

6+ years

of hands‑on experience operating production Kubernetes clusters at scale ( AWS EKS preferred ).

AWS & Cloud-Native Mastery:

Deep architecture expertise across

AWS (EKS, EC2, VPC, IAM)

and Kubernetes internals (scheduling, node lifecycle, cluster upgrades, Karpenter, Cluster Autoscaler).

Custom Controller Development:

Expert proficiency in

Go

or

Python

with proven success building custom Kubernetes operators, controllers, and platform tooling used by developer teams.

IaC & GitOps Fluency:

Advanced experience with

Terraform , Spacelift, and GitOps-driven deployment pipelines ( ArgoCD, Flux, or kube-applier ).

Policy & Workload Reliability:

Practical experience designing and enforcing admission control policies ( OPA/Gatekeeper ) alongside workload reliability constraints (PDBs, probes, topology keys).

Observability & SRE:

Strong instincts defining SLOs, metrics/logging coverage, and data-driven baseline audits.

Work Logistics

Ability to work remotely from within Canada.

Preferred Qualifications

Experience designing platform architectures for high-concurrency fintech, banking, or payments infrastructure.

Track record contributing to open-source Kubernetes upstream projects or CNCF ecosystem projects.

Demonstrated experience driving multi-team platform standardization without creating engineering bottlenecks.

Total Rewards & Benefits

Compensation & Equity:

Market‑comp

📌 Senior Staff Engineer (Winnipeg)
🏢 The Briefed
📍 Winnipeg