Senior Backend Engineer – Search & Discovery (Remote)

Affirm; St. Louis (MO); Remote; USD 204,000 - 290,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Remote-first

Health coverage for you and dependents

Equity rewards

Job summary

Affirm is hiring a senior backend leader to drive strategy for large-scale systems and customer-facing experiences. You’ll partner with product and design to deliver high-availability services using Python or Kotlin, AWS, MySQL, Spark, and Kubernetes, while shaping the future of search and discovery across the platform.

You will mentor engineers, own on-call readiness, and advocate for quality coding and robust design.

Qualifications

• 8+ years designing, developing and launching backend systems at scale.
• Experience with Python or Kotlin for backend development.
• Proven track record building highly available distributed systems (AWS, MySQL, Spark, Kubernetes).
• Experience delivering consumer experiences using UI frameworks (React).
• 2+ years in search or related recommendation engines.
• Ability to define technical plans and write high quality, maintainable code.
• Strong communication across global teams.
• Bachelor’s degree or equivalent practical experience.

Responsibilities

• Set technical strategy for your team on a year-long timescale and align with business projects.
• Collaborate across product management, design & analytics to ensure sustainability and risk-aware decisions.
• Act as a force-multiplier by defining technical solutions and operational processes.
• Own team operations and on-call readiness with monitoring, playbooks, and testing.
• Establish and promote code review and design standards across teams.
• Mentor and develop talent within the team through guidance and role modeling.

Skills

Python

Kotlin

Distributed systems

Search/Recommendation

Education

Bachelor's degree or equivalent practical experience

Tools

AWS

MySQL

Spark

Kubernetes

Job description

Affirm is hiring a senior backend leader to drive strategy for large-scale systems and customer-facing experiences. You’ll partner with product and design to deliver high-availability services using Python or Kotlin, AWS, MySQL, Spark, and Kubernetes, while shaping the future of search and discovery across the platform.

You will mentor engineers, own on-call readiness, and advocate for quality coding and robust design.