Affirm is hiring a remote Senior Software Engineer Backend AI Platform!
Affirm is hiring a senior backend engineer to join its AI Platform team, the group responsible for the company's paved path for building, running, evaluating, and governing AI systems. The team owns an LLM gateway fronting every approved model across AWS Bedrock and other providers, an MCP gateway that mediates and audits tool calls, an agent runtime that bounds agentic execution, and the evals and observability layer that helps teams judge whether an AI change is better, cheaper, or safe. The platform is already in daily use across engineering, with a first production agent live, and the next year shifts focus from developer productivity toward production inference and agents. This is a remote role open to candidates residing in Alberta, British Columbia, Manitoba, New Brunswick, Newfoundland and Labrador, Nova Scotia, Ontario, Prince Edward Island, or Saskatchewan. The engineer will own technical decisions end to end, from design through launch and on-call, and help shape standards for a small AI-native team.
Key responsibilities
- Own technical decisions and projects within the AI Platform team, from design through launch and on-call.
- Design and build gateway, runtime, and evaluation services that move AI workloads from pilot to production at scale.
- Build identity, quota, routing, caching, and failover controls so AI spend is attributable and governable.
- Partner with security, infrastructure, and product engineering on guardrails for agentic workloads and on-behalf-of identity for tool access.
- Define and monitor metrics for team systems and own operational health, including alerting, runbooks, and on-call.
- Set and improve code review and design standards, advocating for them through writing and tech talks.
- Use AI tools and agentic workflows daily across coding, design review, and operations.
- Mentor and grow engineers and drive best practices in design, coding, and testing.
Key requirements
- 4+ years designing, developing, and launching backend systems at scale in Python or Kotlin.
- Track record with highly available distributed systems using AWS, MySQL, and Kubernetes.
- Hands-on production experience with LLMs, agents, or AI frameworks: inference APIs, LLM gateways such as LiteLLM, MCP, tool calling, evals, or agent runtimes.
- Understanding of AI usage patterns and the infrastructure needed to support AI workloads across disciplines.
- Experience defining technical plans for significant features or system components with simple, extensible designs.
- Proficiency making significant changes in large codebases with tools and practices that keep the team safe.
- Strong ownership of personal growth, proactively seeking feedback from team, manager, and stakeholders.
- Clear verbal and written communication for collaboration with a global engineering team.
- Equivalent practical experience or a Bachelor's degree in a related field.
- Seniority: Senior
- Work mode: Remote — open to residents of Alberta, British Columbia, Manitoba, New Brunswick, Newfoundland and Labrador, Nova Scotia, Ontario, Prince Edward Island, or Saskatchewan
- Salary: $153,000 - $213,000 CAD per year
- Key skills: Python, Kotlin, AWS, MySQL, Kubernetes, LLM gateways, LiteLLM, MCP, tool calling, evaluations, agent runtimes, distributed systems, observability, security and identity
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