Staff Software Engineer, Backend (Search)

Affirm is reinventing credit to make it more honest and friendly, giving consumers the flexibility to buy now and pay later without any hidden fees or compounding interest. 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. What You'll Do · You will be responsible for setting technical strategy for your team on a year-long time scale, and help your team tie it together with critical, business-impacting projects. · You will collaborate across teams in the product development lifecycle by collaborating with product management, design & analytics to ensure technical sustainability, risks and trade-offs are well understood and managed. · You will act as a force-multiplier for your team through your definition and advocacy of technical solutions and operational processes. · You 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. · You will 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. · You will help develop talent on your team by providing feedback and guidance, and leading by example. What We Look For · You have 8+ years of experience designing, developing and launching backend systems at scale using languages like Python or Kotlin. · You have an extensive track record of developing highly available distributed systems using technologies like AWS, MySQL, Spark and Kubernetes. · You have experience developing consumer experiences using UI frameworks like React · You have 2+ years of experience working in search or related recommendation engines · You have experience delivering major features, system components or deprecating existing functionality in a system through the definition of a technical and execution plan. You write high quality code that is easily understood and used by others. · You thrive in ambiguity, and are comfortable moving from low level language idioms all the way to the architecture of large systems to understand how they work. · Your growth and impact trajectory demonstrates that you have mastered gathering and iterating on feedback from your engineering and cross-functional peers. · You have strong verbal and written communication skills that support effective collaboration with our global engineering team. Base Pay Grade - P Equity Grade - 7 Employees new to Affirm typically come in at the start of the pay range. Affirm focuses on providing a simple and transparent pay structure which is based on a variety of factors, including location, experience and job-related skills. Base pay is part of a total compensation package that may include monthly stipends for health, wellness and tech spending, and benefits (including 100% subsidized medical coverage, dental and vision for you and your dependents). In addition, the employees may be eligible for equity rewards offered by Affirm Holdings, Inc. (parent company). CAN base pay range per year: CAD $181,000 - $241,000 Location - Remote Canada This remote role is open only to candidates residing in Alberta, British Columbia, Manitoba, New Brunswick, Newfoundland and Labrador, Nova Scotia, Ontario, Prince Edward Island, or Saskatchewan. #LI-Remote Affirm is proud to be a remote-first company! The majority of our roles are remote and you can work almost anywhere within the country of employment. Affirmers in proximal roles have the flexibility to work remotely, but will occasionally be required to work out of their assigned Affirm office. A limited number of roles remain office-based due to the nature of their job responsibilities. We’re extremely proud to offer competitive benefits that are anchored to our core value of people come first. Some key highlights of our benefits package include: - Health care coverage - Affirm covers all premiums for all levels of coverage for you and your dependents - Flexible Spending Wallets - generous stipends for spending on Technology, Food, various Lifestyle needs, and family forming expenses - Time off - competitive vacation and holiday schedules allowing you to take time off to rest and recharge - ESPP - An employee stock purchase plan enabling you to buy shares of Affirm at a disco

8+ years of experience designing, developing and launching backend systems at scale using languages like Python or Kotlin. 2+ years of experience working in search or related recommendation engines. Experience delivering major features, system components or deprecating existing functionality with a clear technical and execution plan. Strong ownership, communication, and ability to operate across ambiguous environments.

Set technical strategy for the team on a year-long timescale and align it with business-impacting projects. Collaborate across product, design, and analytics to ensure sustainability, risk assessment, and trade-offs. Act as a force-multiplier by defining and advocating technical solutions and operational processes. Own the team's operations and availability, including monitoring, on-call rotation, playbooks, testing, and alerting. Establish code review and design standards and promote them beyond the team. Develop talent through feedback and leading by example.