Staff Software Engineer, Backend (Search)

About the role

At Affirm, we exist for the moments that matter—giving people a clear, predictable way to pay over time, with no hidden fees, no surprises, and no tradeoffs on what matters most. As we build Affirm's advertising platform and evolve Marketplace into a best in class shopping destination, the ability to route and discover is one of the greatest levers for consumer experiences. Search is one of the highest impact surfaces, and we are building a new team that will own not just the recommendations and search experiences, but also explore opportunities to improve customer experience, monetization, and merchant value. This team will help make Affirm the definitive destination consumers turn to for discovery, understanding, comparing, and shopping through Affirm, and will also lay the foundation for an agentic platform.

Responsibilities

• Set technical strategy for your team on a year‑long time scale and help tie it together with critical, business‑impacting projects.
• Collaborate across teams in the product development lifecycle with product management, design & analytics to ensure technical sustainability, risks and trade‑offs are well understood and managed.
• Act as a force‑multiplier for your team through definition and advocacy of technical solutions and operational processes.
• Take ownership of your team’s operations and availability by ensuring monitoring, triage rotations, playbooks, policies, testing and alerting are in place to support “keep the lights on” & on‑call efforts.
• Foster a culture of quality and ownership by setting code review and design standards for your team, and advocating for them beyond your team through writing and tech talks.
• Help develop talent on your team by providing feedback and guidance, and leading by example.

Requirements

• 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 through definition of a technical and execution plan.
• Write high quality code that is easily understood and used by others.
• Thrive in ambiguity, comfortable moving from low‑level language idioms to the architecture of large systems.
• Demonstrated growth and impact trajectory showing mastery of gathering and iterating on feedback from engineering and cross‑functional peers.
• Strong verbal and written communication skills for effective collaboration with our global engineering team.
• Either equivalent practical experience or a Bachelor’s degree in a related field.

Pay

• Base Pay Grade - P, Equity Grade - 13.
• USA Pacific base pay range (CA, WA, NY, NJ, CT): $230,000 – $290,000.
• USA Sapphire base pay range (all other U.S. states): $204,000 – $264,000.
• Employees new to Affirm typically come in at the start of the pay range.

Benefits

• 100% subsidized medical, dental and vision coverage for you and your dependents.
• Monthly stipends for tech setup, health and wellness.
• Flexible time off and generous holiday calendars.
• Employee stock purchase plan (ESPP) allowing purchase of Affirm stock at a discount.
• All new hires are invited to attend an in‑person onboarding experience