Lead backend delivery on Affirm's checkout-critical Merchant Data Platform serving millions of requests per day

This role owns quarterly goals and technical direction for a team on Affirm's Merchant Data Platform — a foundational service handling merchant identity, onboarding, and data enrichment for risk and fraud detection at scale. It requires 4+ years of backend experience in Python or Kotlin, distributed systems on AWS/MySQL/Kubernetes, and leadership through ambiguity, plus on-call.

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What this interview tests

Distributed backend systems at scale (AWS, MySQL, Kubernetes)
Python or Kotlin backend development
Owning quarterly team goals and technical roadmaps
System design for availability/latency SLAs on checkout-critical infra
Leading through ambiguity and cross-functional trade-offs
Mentoring engineers and elevating code quality

Common question themes

Describe owning and delivering a quarterly goal for your team end-to-end

Walk through a distributed system you designed for high availability at scale

Tell me about a technical trade-off you negotiated with product or design

How do you approach an on-call incident on a checkout-critical service

Describe a time you made a large-scale, risky change to an existing codebase safely

How have you mentored an engineer through a design or code review

How candidates describe it

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

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