Staff Software Engineer, Backend (Search)

Remote · Remote US · USD 181,000-241,000 / year · 2+ years experience · Remote · Posted Sep 25, 2026

At a glance

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.

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.

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 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.

Remote Canada or Remote US
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.
Remote-first with flexibility built in