Affirm Senior Backend Engineer, Merchant & Partner Lifecycle — building the lifecycle-orchestrator service

This interview centers on Affirm's Merchant & Partner Lifecycle team, where you'd act as a technical leader building a brand-new lifecycle-orchestrator service consolidating merchant lifecycle orchestration at scale. Expect architecture-heavy questions on Domain-Driven Design, distributed systems, state machines, and event-driven design, reflecting the JD's 5+ years bar and stack (AWS, gRPC, Snowflake, Kotlin, Python, MySQL, Kubernetes).

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What this interview tests

Domain-Driven Design and distributed systems architecture
State machines and event-driven architecture for lifecycle orchestration
API design (HTTP vs gRPC/RPC) and database design
Legacy system modernization and isolation for availability
Cross-team technical leadership and mentorship
Async communication (tech specs, ADRs)

Common question themes

Design the lifecycle-orchestrator service for merchant state transitions at scale

How would you decompose or isolate a legacy system to improve availability

Walk through a state machine or event-driven design decision you made

How do you align technical scope across teams on a cross-team project

Describe mentoring an engineer through a complex technical problem

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

How candidates describe it

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