Staff Backend Engineer (Remote Poland) setting technical strategy for Affirm's Deal Reporting team and international funding infrastructure

This is the Remote Poland posting of Affirm's Staff Software Engineer role on the Deal Reporting team, owning capital partner integrations and funding automation for every Affirm loan as part of the team's first international build-out. Requirements mirror the core role: 7+ years building distributed backend systems (Python/Kotlin, AWS, MySQL, Kubernetes), Spark internals knowledge, and the ability to set year-long technical strategy.

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What this interview tests

Distributed backend systems at scale (Python/Kotlin, AWS, MySQL, Kubernetes)
Spark internals and data processing pipelines
Task orchestration (Airflow/Temporal) for financial integrations
Setting year-long technical strategy and driving execution plans
Operational ownership: monitoring, triage rotations, testing, alerting
Operating with ambiguity across low-level code and large-system architecture

Common question themes

Design a highly available system for a capital-partner funding integration

Tell me about setting technical strategy for a team over a multi-quarter horizon

How have you used Spark and what do you understand about its internals

Describe how you've built monitoring/triage/alerting for a production system you own

How do you turn an ambiguous financial reporting requirement into an execution plan

How have you mentored engineers or raised code review standards on a team

How candidates describe it

Real Staff Software Engineer interview stories — retold from candidates' public write-ups, with sources.

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