Senior Staff Software Engineer, Backend (Discovery / Search)

Affirm; Portland (OR); Remote; USD 232,000 - 282,000; Full time

Job summary

An established industry player is seeking a Senior Staff Software Engineer to lead the technical direction in the Discovery domain. This exciting role involves collaborating with cross-functional teams to build scalable solutions that enhance user engagement and product discovery. You will architect and develop core services, influence product decisions, and drive innovation within a remote-first environment. If you're passionate about creating impactful financial products and thrive in a collaborative setting, this opportunity is perfect for you.

Benefits

Health care coverage

Flexible Spending Wallets

Competitive vacation and holiday schedules

Employee stock purchase plan (ESPP)

Qualifications

• Solid CS fundamentals and fluency in Python or similar dynamic language.
• Experience building real-time distributed web services and systems.

Responsibilities

• Build a multi-year technical strategy for the Discovery domain.
• Design and implement core platform services and APIs.

Skills

Python

Real-time distributed web services

Web application frameworks

Cross-team collaboration

User experience focus

Education

Bachelor's degree in a related field

Equivalent practical experience

Tools

APIs

Data-processing pipelines

Job description

Senior Staff Software Engineer, Backend (Discovery / Search)

Remote US

Affirm is reinventing credit to make it more honest and friendly, giving consumers the flexibility to buy now and pay later without any hidden fees or compounding interest.

Affirm is looking for a Senior Staff Software Engineer to take on a key role in defining the technical direction and foster innovation across the Discovery Domain engineering organization. You’ll collaborate with engineering leaders, cross-functional teams, and stakeholders to build scalable, reliable, and high-performing solutions. You'll help shape best practices, guide architectural choices, and drive the successful delivery of critical initiatives. This role requires a high level of technical ability, leadership skills, strong cross-functional communication, and a creative mindset. You will be responsible for building large-scale distributed systems, and developing the overall technology strategy for the Discovery domain within our engineering org.

Discovery domain focuses on building features that bring in new users, engage existing ones, encourage repeat use of Affirm products, and provide value to our customers within the app and marketplace. We own systems like search, read-optimized merchant and consumer data, marketing, and marketplace tooling that provide Affirm consumers a personalized and segmented way to discover and activate Affirm consumer-facing products.

What You'll Do

• Build a multi-year technical strategy for Discovery domain focused on product roadmap, availability, and scale.
• Partner with the architecture team at Affirm to guide architectural choices within the Discovery domain.
• Influence or make product decisions/scope and determine the right technical tradeoffs to deliver customer value quickly.
• Design, implement, and extend core platform services and APIs to enable new products and features to be built.
• Architect and build the next version of our data-processing pipelines.
• Create 3rd party developer APIs and tools.
• Analyze/debug performance issues across distributed services.
• Plan, design, and build our core platform software and systems to scale with an increasing number of users, features, business requirements, partners, and new engineers.

What We Look For

• Passionate: Passionate about Affirm's Mission: "Deliver Honest Financial Products that improve lives"
• Technical: Solid CS fundamentals and fluency in a dynamically typed language. We primarily use Python, but members of our team have backgrounds in a wide range of technologies.
• Collaborative: Enjoy cross-team collaboration especially with product managers and designers.
• Humble: You have the humility and self-awareness to understand and navigate the unknown.
• User Focused: Cares about the details in the user experience.
• Experienced: Background building real-time distributed web services, developing systems in web application frameworks, and implementing highly available data storage.
• This position requires either equivalent practical experience or a Bachelor’s degree in a related field.

Base Pay Grade- R

Equity Grade- 15

Employees new to Affirm typically come in at the start of the pay range. Affirm focuses on providing a simple and transparent pay structure which is based on a variety of factors, including location, experience, and job-related skills.

USA base pay range (CA, WA, NY, NJ, CT) per year: $260,000 - $310,000

USA base pay range (all other U.S. states) per year: $232,000 - $282,000

Affirm is proud to be a remote-first company! The majority of our roles are remote and you can work almost anywhere within the country of employment.

We’re extremely proud to offer competitive benefits that are anchored to our core value of people come first. Some key highlights of our benefits package include:

• Health care coverage - Affirm covers all premiums for all levels of coverage for you and your dependents.
• Flexible Spending Wallets - generous stipends for spending on Technology, Food, various Lifestyle needs, and family forming expenses.
• Time off - competitive vacation and holiday schedules allowing you to take time off to rest and recharge.
• ESPP - An employee stock purchase plan enabling you to buy shares of Affirm at a discount.

We believe It’s On Us to provide an inclusive interview experience for all, including people with disabilities. We are happy to provide reasonable accommodations to candidates in need of individualized support during the hiring process.

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