About the role

Staff Backend Engineer building search and recommendation systems for Affirm’s pay-over-time marketplace. Setting technical strategy and scaling distributed backend systems across Affirm’s shopping platform.

Responsibilities

Set technical strategy for the team on a year-long time scale
Connect the team’s work with critical, business-impacting projects
Collaborate with product management, design, and analytics throughout the product development lifecycle
Ensure technical sustainability, risks, and trade-offs are understood and managed
Define and advocate for technical solutions and operational processes
Own team operations and availability, including monitoring, triage rotations, playbooks, policies, testing, alerting, and on-call efforts
Establish code review and design standards
Advocate for engineering standards through writing and tech talks
Develop team talent through feedback, guidance, and leading by example
Build search and recommendation experiences supporting Affirm’s advertising platform and shopping marketplace

8+ years of experience designing, developing and launching backend systems at scale
Experience using languages like Python or Kotlin
Extensive experience developing highly available distributed systems
Experience with AWS, MySQL, Spark and Kubernetes
Experience developing consumer experiences using UI frameworks like React
2+ years of experience working in search or related recommendation engines
Experience delivering major features, system components, or deprecating existing functionality through technical and execution plans
Ability to write high-quality, easily understood code
Ability to work from low-level language idioms to large-system architecture
Demonstrated ability to gather and iterate on feedback from engineering and cross-functional peers
Strong verbal and written communication skills
Must reside in Alberta, British Columbia, Manitoba, New Brunswick, Newfoundland and Labrador, Nova Scotia, Ontario, Prince Edward Island, or Saskatchewan