Staff Backend Engineer — Scale Search & Discovery (Remote)

Affirm; Pittsburgh (Allegheny County); Remote; USD 230,000 - 290,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health coverage

Equity

Stipends for health, wellness and tech

Job summary

Affirm is seeking a senior backend engineer to design, build, and scale systems that power our advertising, discovery and shopping experiences.

You will own a year-long technical strategy for your team and collaborate with product, design, and analytics to ensure sustainable, high-impact solutions. You will contribute to reliable operations, high-quality code, and cross-functional influence in a remote-first environment.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of experience designing, developing and launching backend systems at scale.
• Extensive experience with AWS, MySQL, Spark and Kubernetes.
• Experience building consumer experiences using React.
• 2+ years in search or recommendation engines.
• Ability to write high quality code and drive technical plans.

Responsibilities

• Set technical strategy for the team on a year-long horizon.
• Collaborate with product, design & analytics to ensure sustainability and manage risks.
• Advocate for scalable technical solutions and operational processes.
• Own team operations, monitoring, triage, playbooks and on-call readiness.
• Set and promote code review and design standards across teams.

Skills

Python

Kotlin

Distributed systems

AWS

MySQL

Spark

Kubernetes

React

Search/recommendation engines

Communication

Education

Bachelor's degree or equivalent

Job description

Affirm is seeking a senior backend engineer to design, build, and scale systems that power our advertising, discovery and shopping experiences.

You will own a year-long technical strategy for your team and collaborate with product, design, and analytics to ensure sustainable, high-impact solutions. You will contribute to reliable operations, high-quality code, and cross-functional influence in a remote-first environment.