Backend engineer building Affirm's new merchant lifecycle-orchestrator service

This interview targets a Software Engineer II joining Affirm's Merchant & Partner Lifecycle team to build a brand-new lifecycle-orchestrator service consolidating merchant onboarding/lifecycle logic. Expect deep questions on distributed systems design, API and state-machine modeling, and how you balance velocity with system simplification at scale.

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What this interview tests

Domain-Driven Design and bounded-context decomposition
State machine and event-driven architecture design
API design (HTTP/RPC) for service-to-service orchestration
Database and data model design under scale (MySQL, Snowflake)
Cross-team technical strategy and written communication (specs, ADRs)
Monitoring/alerting and operational maturity

Common question themes

Design a lifecycle-orchestrator service for merchant onboarding, suspension, and offboarding as a state machine

How would you decompose a legacy monolith's merchant logic into a cohesive new domain

Tradeoffs between synchronous RPC calls and event-driven async communication across services

How do you scope and align a cross-team project via a written technical spec

Debugging an availability regression using monitoring/alerting tools

How have you used AI/agentic dev tools to speed up backend development

How candidates describe it

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

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