Manager, Software Engineering (Resilience Engineering)

Affirm is reinventing credit to make it more honest and friendly, giving consumers the flexibility to buy now and pay later without any hidden fees or compounding interest.

We are seeking a seasoned Engineering Manager to lead our Resilience Engineering team. This role is critical in ensuring the safety and reliability of our production systems through proactive validation techniques, including production load testing and chaos engineering. You will lead the development of systems and practices that allow engineers to safely test system behavior under stress and failure conditions in production, ensuring issues are discovered and mitigated before they impact real users.

Leadership & Strategy

• Define and drive the vision for resilience engineering at affirm, with a focus on production load testing and chaos engineering as first‑class engineering practices.
• Lead and mentor a team of engineers building platforms and tooling for safe production experimentation.
• Partner with infrastructure, product, and security leadership to embed resilience validation into the software development lifecycle.
• Establish best practices for safely testing system limits and failure scenarios in production.

Systems & Operations

• Own the design and evolution of platforms that enable safe, controlled production load testing and fault injection.
• Ensure strong safeguards are in place, including isolation boundaries, approval workflows, and automated rollback mechanisms to protect real users.
• Build systems that provide end‑to‑end observability, traceability, and auditability for all resilience experiments.
• Drive reliability improvements by systematically identifying weaknesses through load testing and chaos experiments.
• Establish monitoring, alerting, and incident response practices tailored to proactive resilience validation.

Collaboration & Enablement

• Work closely with engineering teams to design and execute production load tests and chaos experiments safely.
• Partner with infrastructure teams to build guardrails around tests and experimentations.
• Enable teams to adopt resilience practices by providing reusable tooling, frameworks, and standardized workflows.
• Identify systemic weaknesses and lead cross‑functional efforts to improve reliability and fault tolerance.
• Evangelize a culture of “test failure before failure tests you” across the organization.

What we look for

• Proven experience leading engineering teams in reliability, infrastructure, or distributed systems.
• Hands‑on experience with production load testing, chaos engineering, or large‑scale system validation.
• Experience with leveraging a chaos engineering vendor such as Gremlin, Harness, or a similar solution.
• Strong understanding of failure modes in distributed systems, including latency, partial failure, and cascading outages.
• Experience building or operating systems with strong safety guarantees (isolation, rate limiting, guardrails, auditability).
• Familiarity with cloud‑native environments (AWS, Kubernetes) and observability tooling.
• Strong programming background (e.g., Python, Kotlin, Java, or similar).
• Excellent problem‑solving skills and the ability to balance long‑term resilience investments with immediate business needs.
• Strong communication and leadership skills, with a track record of influencing engineering practices across teams.

Benefits

• Health care coverage – affirm covers all premiums for all levels of coverage for you and your dependents.
• Flexible Spending Wallets – generous stipends for spending on technology, food, various lifestyle needs, and family‑forming expenses.
• Time off – competitive vacation and holiday schedules allowing you to take time off to rest and recharge.
• ESPP – an employee stock purchase plan enabling you to buy shares of affirm at a discount.

Location & Work Arrangement

• Affirm is a remote‑first company. The majority of roles are remote and can be performed almost anywhere within the country of employment. Some roles may require occasional in‑office presence at an assigned affirm office.

Equal Opportunity & Fair Chance

• Affirm is proud to provide an inclusive interview experience for all, including people with disabilities. We are happy to provide reasonable accommodations to candidates in need of individualized support during the hiring process.
• For U.S. positions that could be performed in Los Angeles or San Francisco, affirm will consider qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records pursuant to the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance and Los Angeles Fair Chance Initiative for Hiring Ordinance.

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