Affirm
Mid
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.
Step into this interview
Free · a live voice mock calibrated to this exact role
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