Remote Staff Backend Engineer — Search & Discovery

Affirm; Seattle (WA); On-site; USD 230,000 - 290,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health coverage

Flexible Spending Wallets

Time off

Employee stock purchase program (ESPP)

Job summary

Affirm is building a new team to own discovery, search, and recommendations, enabling a broader customer experience across our platform. You will lead backend architecture and scalable systems, partnering with product, design, and analytics to deliver high-impact features.

You will drive technical strategy, ensure reliability, and mentor engineers while delivering consumer-oriented search and recommender capabilities at scale.

Qualifications

• 8+ years designing, developing and launching backend systems at scale with Python or Kotlin.
• Proven track record building highly available distributed systems using AWS, MySQL, Spark and Kubernetes.
• Experience delivering consumer experiences using UI frameworks like React.
• 2+ years in search or related recommendation engines.
• Able to define technical & execution plans and write high-quality, usable code.
• Comfortable navigating from low-level code to system architecture.

Responsibilities

• Set technical strategy for the team on a yearly horizon tied to business goals.
• Collaborate with product, design, and analytics to ensure sustainability and trade-offs are understood.
• Act as force-multiplier by defining tools, processes, and standards for the team.
• Own operations and on-call readiness with monitoring, playbooks and incident response.
• Establish code review and design standards and advocate for them across teams.
• Mentor and develop team members through feedback and leadership.

Skills

Backend design

Distributed systems

Python or Kotlin

AWS

MySQL

Spark

Kubernetes

React

Education

Bachelor's degree or equivalent practical experience

Tools

AWS

MySQL

Spark

Kubernetes

Job description

Affirm is building a new team to own discovery, search, and recommendations, enabling a broader customer experience across our platform. You will lead backend architecture and scalable systems, partnering with product, design, and analytics to deliver high-impact features.

You will drive technical strategy, ensure reliability, and mentor engineers while delivering consumer-oriented search and recommender capabilities at scale.