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Staff Software Engineer, Backend (Search)

Affirm· Consumer Engineering
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Remote$230k - $290kFull-timePosted 2w ago

About the role

Staff Software Engineer, Backend (Search) at Affirm focused on building and scaling the search/discovery experiences within Affirm’s advertising platform and marketplace, with leadership on technical strategy, reliability, and cross-functional collaboration across product, design, and analytics.

Responsibilities

  • Setting technical strategy for the team on a year-long time scale and tying it to business-impacting projects
  • Collaborating across teams in the product development lifecycle with product management, design & analytics to ensure technical sustainability, risks and trade-offs are understood
  • Acting as a force-multiplier through definition and advocacy of technical solutions and operational processes
  • Owning the team’s operations and availability with monitoring, triage rotations, playbooks, policies, testing and alerting for on-call readiness
  • Fostering a culture of quality and ownership by setting code review and design standards and advocating for them beyond the team
  • Developing talent on the team by providing feedback and 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 plans; high-quality code
  • Comfort with moving from low-level language idioms to architecture of large systems
  • Growth mindset with ability to gather and iterate on feedback from engineering and cross-functional peers
  • Strong verbal and written communication skills for collaboration with a global engineering team
  • Equivalent practical experience or a Bachelor’s degree in a related field

Skills

Required:Backend developmentDistributed systemsCloud & infra (AWS)Database (MySQL)Containerization / orchestration (Kubernetes)Search/recommendation engines
Nice to have:Frontend experience (React)

Benefits

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

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