Engineering Manager - System Reliability & Chaos

At Affirm, we exist for the moments that matter—giving people a clear, predictable way to pay over time with no hidden fees, no surprises, and no tradeoffs on what matters most.

We are seeking a seasoned Engineering Manager to lead our Resilience Engineering team. In this critical leadership role, you will define and drive the vision for proactive system validation across Affirm's production ecosystem. You will manage a team of engineers building automated platforms, safety guardrails, and experimentation tools for production load testing and chaos engineering (fault injection). Partnering with Infrastructure, Product, and Security leaders, you will embed "test failure before failure tests you" into the software development lifecycle, ensuring distributed system weaknesses, partial failures, and cascading outages are caught and remediated before impacting real users.

Key Responsibilities

• Leadership & Resilience Strategy: Define and execute the strategic vision for resilience engineering across Affirm, establishing production load testing and chaos experimentation as core engineering practices.
• Team Management & Development: Hire, mentor, and grow a team of systems and reliability engineers building platforms for safe production experimentation.
• Production Experimentation Platforms: Own the design and evolution of fault-injection and load-testing platforms equipped with strict isolation boundaries, automated blast-radius guardrails, rate limiting, and rollback mechanisms.
• Systemic Weakness Remediation: Systematically identify distributed system bottlenecks, latency anomalies, and failure cascades through chaos testing; lead cross-functional engineering remediations.
• Observability & Safety Guardrails: Build end-to-end traceability, auditability, and observability mechanisms for all production experiments, maintaining strict monitoring and incident response workflows.
• Cross-Functional Advocacy: Partner with product and platform teams to provide reusable frameworks, standardized chaos testing workflows, and best practices across the organization.

Requirements

Engineering Management & Reliability Depth

• Proven track record of leading engineering teams within reliability engineering, core infrastructure, distributed systems, or site reliability (SRE) domains.
• Chaos Engineering & Load Testing: Direct hands-on experience building or operating platforms for production load testing, fault injection, and chaos engineering.
• Vendor Tooling Expertise: Experience leveraging commercial chaos engineering platforms (e.g., Gremlin, Harness, or open-source equivalents like Chaos Mesh / Litmus).
• Distributed Systems Architecture: Deep understanding of distributed system failure modes, including network partitions, latency spikes, partial failures, circuit breaking, and cascading outages.
• Safety & Guardrail Infrastructure: Experience building software with strong safety guarantees, such as automated kill-switches, blast-radius isolation, rate limiting, and audit logging.
• Cloud-Native & Technical Stack: Familiarity with cloud-native infrastructure (AWS, Kubernetes), modern observability stacks, and strong programming foundations in languages such as Python, Kotlin, Java, or similar.

Education & Work Logistics

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related technical discipline (or equivalent practical industry experience).
• Ability to work remotely within the United States.
• Willingness to participate in an interactive in-person onboarding experience.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience executing chaos experiments and load testing on high-throughput financial platforms, payment gateways, or zero-downtime transactional databases.
• Familiarity with service mesh architectures (Istio, Envoy) and dynamic traffic routing for canary fault injection.

Total Rewards & Benefits

• 100% Employer-Paid Healthcare: Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision insurance with 100% of premiums covered for employees and their eligible dependents.
• Equity & Stock Purchase Plan: Equity rewards package plus Employee Stock Purchase Plan (ESPP) allowing team members to buy Affirm stock at a discount.
• Monthly Spending Stipends: Monthly stipends to support home office technology setups, wellness, and health spending.
• Time Off & Onboarding: Flexible time off, generous paid holiday schedules, and an interactive in-person onboarding experience.