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Staff Software Engineer, Backend (Search)

Affirm· Consumer Engineering
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Hybrid (Canada)CA$181k - CA$241kfull-timePosted 2w ago

About the role

Senior backend engineer focusing on search and discovery capabilities within Affirm's advertising platform, building scalable, highly available systems and leading technical strategy for the team.

Responsibilities

  • Setting technical strategy for the team on a year-long time scale and aligning it with business-impacting projects
  • Collaborating across product management, design & analytics to ensure technical sustainability, risks and trade-offs are understood and managed
  • Acting as a force-multiplier by defining and advocating technical solutions and operational processes
  • Owning the team’s operations and availability, ensuring monitoring, triage rotations, playbooks, policies, testing and alerting for reliability
  • Fostering a culture of quality and ownership by setting code review and design standards and promoting them via writing and tech talks
  • Developing talent on the team by providing feedback, guidance, and leading by example

Qualifications

  • 8+ years of experience designing, developing and launching backend systems at scale using languages like Python or Kotlin
  • Extensive track record of developing highly available distributed systems using AWS, MySQL, Spark and Kubernetes
  • Experience developing consumer experiences using UI frameworks like React
  • 2+ years of experience working in search or related recommendation engines
  • Experience delivering major features or deprecating functionality through technical and execution planning
  • Comfort with ambiguity, able to reason from low-level details to large system architecture
  • Growth mindset with experience gathering and iterating on feedback from engineering and cross-functional peers
  • Strong verbal and written communication skills for collaboration with a global engineering team

Skills

Required:Backend design and developmentDistributed systemsCloud platforms (AWS)Databases (MySQL)Container orchestration (Kubernetes)
Nice to have:Big data / data processing (Spark)Frontend experience (React)

Benefits

  • Health coverage at no cost for employee and dependents
  • Monthly stipends for tech setup and health/wellness options
  • Flexible time off and generous holiday calendar
  • Employee stock purchase plan (ESPP) with stock discounts
Last updated Oct 7, 2026. Interested? Apply on the company site.

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