Manager, Software Engineering (Developer Environments)

Affirm is reinventing credit to make it more honest and friendly, giving consumers the flexibility to buy now and pay later without any hidden fees or compounding interest.

Developer Productivity exists to make work better for every engineer at Affirm. Our mission is to simplify and accelerate software development across the company. We own the entire space between a developer’s laptop and production, including ephemeral dev environments, CI/CD pipelines, test automation frameworks, dependency management, and release engineering. Our tools and platforms enable engineers to ship code quickly, safely, and with confidence. This org supports 800+ engineers working across a broad stack in a hypergrowth FinTech environment—a complex, high‑leverage challenge with impact at scale.

The Developer Environments team builds fast, stable developer environments that make it easy for Affirm engineers to create, test, and debug their features. We own Affirm’s ephemeral development environments, used across both development and CI workflows.

We’re seeking a seasoned Engineering Manager to lead Developer Environments. This role is critical to the end-to-end inner loop experience for engineers. You will lead the team building and operating the platforms that support environment provisioning, test execution, and automated developer infrastructure—partnering closely with CI/CD, infrastructure, security, and product engineering teams.

What you’ll do

Leadership & Strategy

• Define and drive the vision for Developer Environments and inner-loop developer productivity at Affirm.
• Set technical strategy for your team on a year-long time scale, and tie it to critical, business-impacting projects.
• Lead and mentor a team of engineers, fostering a culture of ownership, collaboration, and technical excellence.
• Partner with engineering leadership and stakeholders to align Developer Environments priorities with broader product, platform, and reliability goals.

Systems & Operations

• Own the design, scalability, reliability, and usability of the systems powering Affirm’s ephemeral developer environments used in both development and CI contexts.
• Improve environment provisioning, stability, and teardown workflows to enhance developer velocity and reliability.
• Drive measurable improvements to the developer journey (e.g., startup time, success rate, performance, debuggability, resource utilization).
• Implement monitoring, alerting, incident response processes, and operational playbooks to minimize downtime and developer impact.
• Collaborate with CI/CD and Test Platform partners to tighten feedback loops and ensure environments integrate cleanly with build/test workflows.

Collaboration & Enablement

• Work closely across engineering to ensure smooth adoption of Developer Environments tooling and best practices.
• Identify developer pain points and lead initiatives to improve productivity through tooling, automation, and self-service.
• Foster a culture of quality and ownership on your team by setting and improving code review and design standards, and advocating for them beyond your team through writing and knowledge sharing.

What we look for

• 7+ years of software engineering experience, with 2+ years of engineering management experience (or equivalent people leadership experience).
• Proven experience leading engineering teams in infrastructure, platform engineering, developer productivity, or adjacent domains.
• Strong technical background in backend/infrastructure systems (Python or Kotlin preferred, but not required) and the ability to guide architecture and execution.
• Experience building and operating cloud-native systems (AWS, Kubernetes) and using infrastructure-as-code practices.
• Hands-on familiarity with containerized environments (Docker/Kubernetes) and CI/CD systems (e.g., Buildkite, Jenkins, GitHub Actions).
• Track record of operating services with a high reliability bar (monitoring, on-call, incident response, postmortems, continuous hardening).
• Strong communication and leadership skills, with a track record of mentoring and growing high-performing teams.
• Comfort balancing trade-offs between build vs. buy, speed vs. safety, and developer experience vs. operational constraints.
• This position requires either equivalent practical experience or a Bachelor’s degree in a related field.

Nice to have

• Prior experience building or managing ephemeral or remote developm…