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).

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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

How candidates describe it

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

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