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 you have the right monitoring, triage rotations, playbooks, policies, testing and alerting in place to support “keep the lights on” & on‑call efforts.
• Foster a culture of quality and ownership on your team by setting code review and design standards for your team, and advocating for them beyond your team through your writing and tech talks.
• Help develop talent on your team by providing feedback and guidance, and leading by example.

Qualifications

• 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 in a system through the definition of a technical and execution plan.
• Write high quality code that is easily understood and used by others.
• Thrive in ambiguity, and are comfortable moving from low level language idioms all the way to the architecture of large systems to