Lead the lifecycle-orchestrator service rebuild at Affirm

Senior backend engineering role on Affirm's Merchant & Partner Lifecycle team, acting as a technical leader building a new lifecycle-orchestrator service that consolidates merchant lifecycle orchestration at the heart of multiple connected systems. Remote US, this interview centers on domain-driven design, distributed systems, and mentoring at 5+ years of backend experience on a stack of AWS, gRPC, Kotlin, Python, MySQL, and Kubernetes.

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What this interview tests

Domain-Driven Design and service decomposition
Distributed systems tradeoffs (availability, state machines, event-driven architecture)
API design (HTTP and RPC/gRPC) and database design
Cross-team technical leadership and mentoring
Written technical communication (specs, ADRs)
Agentic/AI-assisted development workflow

Common question themes

Walk me through a system where you applied Domain-Driven Design to consolidate or simplify an architecture

Describe a distributed systems tradeoff you made involving availability, state machines, or event-driven design

How have you designed APIs (HTTP/RPC) and data models for a system serving massive scale?

Tell me about aligning technical scope with other teams on a cross-team project

How do you mentor engineers and drive their growth?

Describe a tech spec or ADR you wrote for a large, ambiguous problem

How do you use agentic development tools like Claude Code in your workflow?

How candidates describe it

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

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