Staff Software Engineer, Backend (Search)

Affirm is building a marketplace and advertising platform centered on honest, transparent consumer credit. We're creating a new team to own search, recommendations, and discovery experiences—some of our highest-impact surfaces for customer acquisition and engagement. This role offers the chance to shape technical strategy for systems that directly influence consumer behavior, merchant visibility, and platform monetization at scale.

About the Role

As Staff Software Engineer, Backend, you'll set multi-year technical direction for a team focused on marketplace routing, search, and discovery. You'll partner with product, design, and analytics to balance technical sustainability with business impact, while owning your team's operational health, on-call readiness, and code quality standards. This is a force-multiplier role where you'll influence architecture decisions, develop talent, and drive adoption of technical best practices across the organization.

Responsibilities

• Define and communicate technical strategy on a 12-month horizon; connect strategy to critical, business-driving projects
• Collaborate with product, design, and analytics partners throughout the development lifecycle to identify risks, trade-offs, and sustainability concerns
• Own your team's monitoring, alerting, triage processes, on-call rotations, and runbooks to ensure reliability and availability
• Establish and advocate for code review, design, and testing standards; evangelize these practices through documentation, tech talks, and cross-team influence
• Mentor team members through feedback, guidance, and modeling of high-quality engineering practices
• Lead definition and execution of major features, system components, and deprecation initiatives

Requirements

• 8+ years designing, developing, and launching backend systems at scale with Python, Kotlin, or similar languages
• Proven experience building highly available distributed systems using AWS, MySQL, Spark, Kubernetes, or equivalent technologies
• 2+ years working on search, ranking, or recommendation engine systems
• Experience delivering complex features or system migrations through defined technical and execution plans
• Ability to navigate ambiguity and reason across multiple levels of abstraction—from language idioms to system architecture
• Track record of writing clear, maintainable code that others can easily understand and extend
• Experience with consumer-facing UI development using React or similar frameworks

Location & Work Arrangement

Remote, US-based.