Staff Software Engineer

Summary

Join Affirm's Search Platform team and help build the next generation of Affirm Marketplace Search. You will collaborate with cross-functional teams to optimize search relevance and solve complex technical challenges. This role requires setting technical strategy, collaborating across teams, and ensuring team operations and availability. You will foster a culture of quality and ownership, develop team talent, and have a significant impact on Affirm's growth. The ideal candidate has extensive experience in backend systems, distributed systems, and search technologies. Affirm offers competitive benefits, including 100% subsidized medical coverage, flexible spending wallets, and generous time off.

Requirements

• Have 8+ years of experience designing, developing and launching backend systems at scale using languages like Python or Kotlin
• Have an extensive track record of developing highly available distributed systems using technologies like AWS, MySQL, Spark and Kubernetes
• Have experience delivering major features, system components or deprecating existing functionality in a system through the definition of a technical and execution plan. You write high quality code that is easily understood and used by others
• Thrive in ambiguity, and are comfortable moving from low level language idioms all the way to the architecture of large systems to understand how they work
• Your growth and impact trajectory demonstrates that you have mastered gathering and iterating on feedback from your engineering and cross-functional peers
• Have strong verbal and written communication skills that support effective collaboration with our global engineering team

Responsibilities

• Collaborate with cross-functional product, engineering, and data science teams to experiment, iterate, and optimize search relevance
• Solve complex technical challenges in information retrieval, ranking, embeddings, and large-scale distributed systems
• Set technical strategy for your team on a year-long time scale, and help your team tie it together with critical, business-impacting projects
• Collaborate across teams in the product development lifecycle by collaborating with product management, design & analytics to ensure technical sustainability, risks and trade-offs are well understood and managed
• Act as a force-multiplier for your team through your definition and advocacy of technical solutions and operational processes
• Take ownership of your team’s operations and availability by ensuring you have the right monitoring, triage rotations, playbooks, policies, testing and alerting in place to support “keep the lights on” & on-call efforts
• Foster a culture of quality and ownership on your team by setting code review and design standards for your team, and advocating for them beyond your team through your writing and tech talks
• Help develop talent on your team by providing feedback and guidance, and leading by example

Preferred Qualifications

• Extensive experience with OpenSearch, ElasticSearch or other search technologies
• Experience productizing ML based search solutions

Benefits

• 100% subsidized medical coverage, dental and vision for you and your dependents
• Equity rewards offered by Affirm Holdings, Inc. (parent company)
• Type of employment: Contract of Employment
• Flexible Spending Wallets for tech, food and lifestyle
• Away Days - wellness days to take off work and recharge
• Learning & Development programs
• Parental leave
• Employee Resource & Community Groups
• Location - Remote Poland
• 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