Remote Staff Backend Engineer - Search & Discovery

Affirm; Boulder (CO); On-site; USD 204,000 - 290,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health care coverage

Flexible Spending Wallets

Time off

Employee stock purchase plan (ESPP)

Job summary

Affirm is building a new engineering team to own discovery, search, and recommendation experiences within our advertising platform. We seek an accomplished backend engineer to lead design and execution of scalable systems.

You will influence technical strategy, collaborate across product, design, and analytics, and drive quality and ownership across your team. This role offers remote-first work with strong growth opportunities and a transparent compensation structure.

Qualifications

• 8+ years designing, developing and launching backend systems at scale with Python or Kotlin.
• Proven record building highly available distributed systems with AWS, MySQL, Spark and Kubernetes.
• Experience delivering consumer experiences with React.
• 2+ years in search or related recommendation engines.
• Proven ability to define technical and execution plans to deliver major features or deprecate functionality.
• Comfort with ambiguity and moving from low-level code to system architecture.
• Strong feedback-driven growth and cross-functional collaboration.
• Excellent verbal and written communication; suitable for global teams.
• Bachelor's degree or equivalent practical experience.

Responsibilities

• Set long-term technical strategy for the team on a year-long horizon.
• Collaborate with product management, design, and analytics to ensure sustainability and trade-offs.
• Advocate and define technical solutions and operational processes.
• Own team operations, availability, monitoring, playbooks, and on-call readiness.
• Establish and promote code review and design standards across teams.
• Mentor and develop team members through feedback and leadership.

Skills

Python

Kotlin

Distributed systems

React

Search engines

Education

Bachelor's degree or equivalent

Tools

AWS

MySQL

Spark

Kubernetes

Job description

Affirm is building a new engineering team to own discovery, search, and recommendation experiences within our advertising platform. We seek an accomplished backend engineer to lead design and execution of scalable systems.

You will influence technical strategy, collaborate across product, design, and analytics, and drive quality and ownership across your team. This role offers remote-first work with strong growth opportunities and a transparent compensation structure.