Staff Software Engineer
About this role
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 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.
The Marketplace Experience team sits within Affirm’s Direct-to-Consumer organization and owns the core discovery and evaluation surfaces that help shoppers find the right merchant and financing option for their needs. Our scope includes search, deals, and merchant detail experiences, which are high-traffic, highly visible entry points that directly influence shopper trust, engagement, and downstream conversion. We work at the intersection of consumer experience, merchant strategy, and platform capabilities, partnering closely with Product, Design, Analytics, and dependent platform teams.
We are seeking a Staff Software Engineer to provide technical leadership across Marketplace Experience. This is a senior individual contributor role for an engineer who can define and drive long-term technical strategy while remaining deeply hands-on. You will shape the evolution of our systems as we scale the Marketplace to support new discovery paradigms, personalization, and experimentation, while maintaining high standards for performance, reliability, and quality.
In this role, you will operate as a force multiplier by setting architectural direction, leading cross-team initiatives, and raising the bar for engineering excellence across the team. You’ll be expected to navigate ambiguity, balance product velocity with technical sustainability, and mentor engineers through example and feedback. If you’re motivated by owning critical customer-facing systems and influencing how teams build and operate software, this role offers broad scope and impact.
Responsibilities
- You will be responsible for setting technical strategy for your team on a year-long time scale, and help your team tie it together with critical, business-impacting projects.
- You will 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.
- You will act as a force-multiplier for your team through your definition and advocacy of technical solutions and operational processes.
- You take ownership of your team’s operations and availability by ensuring you have the right monitoring, triage rotations, playbooks, polcities, testing and alerting in place to support “keep the lights on” & on-call efforts.
- You will 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.
- You will help develop talent on your team by providing feedback and guidance, and leading by example.
- What We Look For
- You have 8+ years of experience designing, developing and launching backend systems at scale using languages like Python or Kotlin.
- You have an extensive track record of developing highly available distributed systems using technologies like AWS, MySQL, Spark and Kubernetes.
- You 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.
- You 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.
- You have strong verbal and written communication skills that support effective collaboration with our global engineering team.