Affirm
Mid
Build the lifecycle-orchestrator backbone behind Affirm's merchant platform
Affirm's Merchant & Partner Lifecycle team is consolidating merchant onboarding and lifecycle orchestration into a new cohesive domain that has to scale to hundreds of thousands of merchants. This interview probes backend system design (state machines, event-driven architecture, DDD), cross-team technical leadership, and fluency with Affirm's actual stack (AWS, gRPC, Kotlin, MySQL, Kubernetes).
Step into this interview
Free · a live voice mock calibrated to this exact role
What this interview tests
- Domain-Driven Design & bounded-context modeling
- Distributed systems / event-driven architecture
- API design (HTTP vs RPC/gRPC) and state machines
- Database & data model design at scale
- Monitoring/alerting and production ownership
- Cross-team technical leadership and written communication (ADRs, specs)
Common question themes
Design a lifecycle-orchestrator service that must scale to hundreds of thousands of merchants
How would you decompose a monolithic merchant lifecycle into bounded domains?
Walk through modeling a merchant's lifecycle as a state machine
gRPC vs HTTP API tradeoffs for internal services
How do you safely modernize legacy backend code without breaking dependent teams
Describe how you'd use Claude Code or similar agentic tools in your daily engineering workflow
How do you write a tech spec/ADR for a cross-team architectural decision