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Salary: USD 204,000 - 290,000 / annual
Affirm is building a new search and discovery team to power its advertising platform and marketplace. This role is a Staff Software Engineer focused on backend systems for search, recommendations, and discovery experiences. You will own the technical strategy for your team on a year-long horizon, collaborating with product, design, and analytics to ensure technical sustainability and manage risks. You'll act as a force-multiplier through defining technical solutions and operational processes, taking ownership of team operations, availability, monitoring, and on-call rotations. You'll foster a culture of quality by setting code review and design standards, and help develop talent through feedback and mentorship.
The team is building the foundation for search routing, recommendations, and an agentic platform that will make Affirm a definitive destination for consumer discovery and shopping. This is a high-impact surface with significant levers for improving customer experience, monetization, and merchant value.
REQUIREMENTS:
- 8+ years of experience designing, developing, and launching backend systems at scale using Python or Kotlin
- Extensive track record 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
- Demonstrated ability to deliver major features, system components, or deprecate existing functionality through technical and execution planning
- Write high-quality code that is easily understood and used by others
- Comfortable with ambiguity and moving from low-level language idioms to large system architecture
- Growth and impact trajectory demonstrating mastery of gathering and iterating on feedback from engineering and cross-functional peers
- Strong verbal and written communication skills for effective collaboration with global engineering teams
- Bachelor's degree in a related field or equivalent practical experience
