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Salary: CAD 181,000 - 241,000 / annual
Affirm is building a new search and discovery team to power its advertising platform and marketplace. This role is a Staff-level backend engineer responsible for setting technical strategy, owning system architecture, and leading a team of engineers.
You will own the technical direction for search and recommendation systems on a year-long horizon, collaborating with product, design, and analytics to ensure technical sustainability and manage trade-offs. You'll act as a force-multiplier by defining technical solutions and operational processes, taking ownership of team operations including monitoring, on-call rotations, and incident response. You will establish code review and design standards, foster a culture of quality and ownership, and develop talent through mentorship and feedback.
The team is building not just search and recommendations, but exploring opportunities to improve customer experience, monetization, and merchant value. This work will help make Affirm a definitive shopping destination and lay the foundation for an agentic platform.
Key responsibilities include:
- Setting technical strategy and tying it to business-impacting projects
- Collaborating across product development lifecycle with cross-functional teams
- Ensuring operational excellence through monitoring, alerting, testing, and playbooks
- Establishing and advocating for technical standards and best practices
- Developing and mentoring team members
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 in search or related recommendation engines
- Demonstrated ability to deliver major features, system components, or deprecations through technical and execution planning
- High-quality code writing that is easily understood and used by others
- Comfort with ambiguity and ability to work across language idioms and large system architecture
- Growth trajectory demonstrating mastery of gathering and iterating on feedback from engineering and cross-functional peers
- Strong verbal and written communication skills for effective global collaboration
