Senior Backend Engineer - Discovery & Search (Remote)

Affirm; Philadelphia (Philadelphia County); On-site; USD 204,000 - 264,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity

Health stipends

Remote-first

Job summary

Affirm is building a new remote-first engineering team focused on high-availability backend systems and discovery/recommendation capabilities. You will help set long-term technical strategy and collaborate with product, design and analytics to drive impactful projects.

You will own operations, define standards, and mentor teammates while delivering scalable services in Python or Kotlin, AWS, MySQL, Spark and Kubernetes. Strong UI/React experience is valued for cross-functional work.

Qualifications

• 8+ years designing, developing and launching backend systems at scale.
• Experience with Python or Kotlin in production.
• Track record of highly available distributed systems (AWS, MySQL, Spark, Kubernetes).
• Experience delivering consumer experiences with React and search/recommendation engines.
• Strong communication and cross-functional collaboration skills.

Responsibilities

• Set technical strategy for the team on a year-long horizon.
• Collaborate across product, design and analytics for sustainable solutions.
• Define technical solutions and operational processes as a force multiplier.
• Own team operations, monitoring, on-call readiness and incident response.
• Promote quality and design standards via writing and tech talks.
• Develop talent through feedback and lead by example.

Skills

Python

Kotlin

Distributed systems

AWS

MySQL

Spark

Kubernetes

React

Search engines

Education

Bachelor’s degree or equivalent

Job description

Affirm is building a new remote-first engineering team focused on high-availability backend systems and discovery/recommendation capabilities. You will help set long-term technical strategy and collaborate with product, design and analytics to drive impactful projects.

You will own operations, define standards, and mentor teammates while delivering scalable services in Python or Kotlin, AWS, MySQL, Spark and Kubernetes. Strong UI/React experience is valued for cross-functional work.