Staff Software Engineer

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.

• 8+ years of experience designing, developing, and launching backend systems at scale using languages like Python or Kotlin.
• Extensive track record of developing highly available distributed systems using technologies like AWS, MySQL, Spark, and Kubernetes.
• Experience delivering major features, system components, or deprecating existing functionality through definition of technical and execution plans.
• Ability to write high quality code that is easily understood and used by others.
• Comfortable working from low level language idioms to architecture of large systems to understand how they work.
• Demonstrated growth and impact trajectory with mastery in gathering and iterating on feedback from engineering and cross-functional peers.
• Strong verbal and written communication skills supporting effective collaboration with a global engineering team.

• Set technical strategy for your team on a year-long time scale and help tie it together with critical, business-impacting projects.
• Collaborate across teams in the product development lifecycle with product management, design, and analytics to ensure technical sustainability, risks, and trade-offs are well understood and managed.
• Act as a force-multiplier for your team through definition and advocacy of technical solutions and operational processes.
• Take ownership of your team’s operations and availability by ensuring proper monitoring, triage rotations, playbooks, policies, testing, and alerting to support "keep the lights on" and on-call efforts.
• Foster a culture of quality and ownership by setting code review and design standards for your team and advocating for them beyond your team through writing and tech talks.
• Help develop talent on your team by providing feedback and guidance, and leading by example.

This job description is not a contractual document and is not intended to have binding force.

Affirm is proud to be a remote-first company. The majority of roles can be located anywhere in Poland. Affirmers in proximal roles have flexibility to work remotely but may occasionally be required to work out of their assigned Affirm office. A limited number of roles remain office-based due to the nature of their job responsibilities.