Staff Software Engineer, Backend (Search)

About the Role

Affirm is building an advertising platform and evolving Marketplace into a best-in-class shopping destination. Search is one of the highest impact surfaces, and we are building a new team that will own recommendation and search experiences, explore opportunities to improve customer experience, monetization, and merchant value, and lay the foundation for an agentic platform.

What You'll Do

• Set technical strategy for your team on a year-long time scale, connecting it with critical, business-impacting projects.
• Collaborate across teams in the product development lifecycle with product management, design, and analytics to manage technical sustainability, risks, and trade-offs.
• Act as a force-multiplier for your team by defining and advocating for technical solutions and operational processes.
• Take ownership of team operations and availability by establishing monitoring, triage rotations, playbooks, policies, testing, and alerting for on-call efforts.
• Foster a culture of quality and ownership by setting code review and design standards and advocating for them through tech talks and technical writing.
• Develop talent on your team by providing feedback, guidance, and leading by example.

What We Look For

• 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 technologies like 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, system components, or deprecating existing functionality with high-quality, readable code.
• Ability to thrive in ambiguity and move seamlessly between low-level idioms and large-scale system architecture.
• Demonstrated trajectory of gathering and iterating on peer and cross-functional feedback.
• Strong verbal and written communication skills supporting collaboration across a global engineering team.
• Bachelor’s degree in a related field or equivalent practical experience.