Staff Software Engineer, Backend (Marketplace/App Experience)

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. As we build Affirm's advertising platform and evolve Marketplace into a best in class shopping destination, the ability to route and discover is one of the greatest levers for consumer experiences. Search is one of the highest impact surfaces, and we are building a new team that will own not just the recommendations and search experiences, but also explore opportunities to improve customer experience, monetization, and merchant value. This team will help make Affirm the definitive destination consumers turn to for discovery, understanding, comparing, and shopping through Affirm, and will also lay the foundation for an agentic platform. What You'll Do · 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, policies, 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 developing consumer experiences using UI frameworks like React · You have 2+ years of experience working in search or related recommendation engines · 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. Base Pay Grade - P Equity Grade - 7 Employees new to Affirm typically come in at the start of the pay range. Affirm focuses on providing a simple and transparent pay structure which is based on a variety of factors, including location, experience and job-related skills. Base pay is part of a total compensation package that may include monthly stipends for health, wellness and tech spending, and benefits (including 100% subsidized medical coverage, dental and vision for you and your dependents). In addition, the employees may be eligible for equity rewards offered by Affirm Holdings, Inc. (parent company). CAN base pay range per year: CAD $181,000 - $241,000 Location - Remote Canada This remote role is open only to candidates residing in Alberta, British Columbia, Manitoba, New Brunswick, Newfoundland and Labrador, Nova Scotia, Ontario, Prince Edward Island, or Saskatchewan. #LI-Remote Affirm is proud to be a remote-first company! The majority of our roles are remote and you can work almost anywhere within the country of employment. Affirmers in proximal roles have the flexibility to work remotely, but will 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. We’re extremely proud to offer competitive benefits that are anchored to our core value of people come first. Some key highlights of our benefits package include:  * 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 We believe It’s On Us to provide an inclusive interview experience for all, including people with disabilities. We are happy to provide reasonable accommodations to candidates in need of individualized support during the hiring process. [For U.S. positions that could be performed in Los Angeles or San Francisco] Pursuant to the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance and Los Angeles Fair Chance Initiative for Hiring Ordinance, Affirm will consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records. By clicking "Submit Application," you acknowledge that you have read Affirm's Global Candidate Privacy Notice [https://www.affirm.com/global-candidate-privacy-notice] and hereby freely and unambiguously give informed consent to the collection, processing, use, and storage of your personal information as described therein.

An Introduction to Primer Primer is the unified infrastructure for global payments. We give finance and payments teams the visibility and control to reduce complexity, improve performance, and capture more revenue - all from a single platform. Backed by Sofina, Peak XV Partners, ICONIQ, Tencent, Accel, and Balderton, we're building the payments layer the world's best companies rely on. Watch our showcase > Read up on our $100m Series C Learn more about our culture > WHAT TEAM WILL YOU BE JOINING? Primer's power grows every time a new partner plugs in — and we make that possible at scale! In the Partners team we build the platform that enables third parties to unlock Primer's unified payments infrastructure and use it as a foundation for their own growth. We're building the app store for payments: a scalable, flexible ecosystem where partners can discover, integrate, and distribute through Primer. This team covers: Partner Dashboard, Partner Integration Ownership & Management, Marketplace, Documentation & Samples, Payment & Workflow Integrations, and the underlying integration framework (Nexus) that powers everything under the hood. Partners is made up of two sub-teams: Partner Experience, focused on the tools and interfaces that make Primer an attractive and easy platform for third parties to build on; and Integrations Core, focused on the technical frameworks that make integrations scalable, consistent, and maintainable.   WHAT WILL YOU BE DOING? * Setting and driving the technical strategy across the Partners engineering teams, from architecture decisions through to hands-on implementation * Owning the design of core backend services for high-performance distributed systems, with scale and reliability as non-negotiables * Acting as the technical authority on partner integrations — shaping how third-party PSPs connect with Primer's platform and raising the bar on what "seamless" actually means * Leading and influencing engineers across teams without direct authority — through code, design reviews, and technical mentorship * Spotting and resolving cross-team technical dependencies before they become blockers * Driving adoption of modern engineering practices (BDD, TDD, rigorous documentation) and holding the line on quality * Partnering closely with Product to shape roadmap decisions where the technical constraints or opportunities are material WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR * Demonstrable experience operating at staff or principal level — setting technical direction across multiple teams, not just within one * Deep backend engineering expertise, with a track record of designing and building distributed systems at scale * The kind of judgment that earns trust fast — engineers follow your technical lead because you're right, not because of your title * Experience with Python is a strong advantage; we're less concerned about specific languages than we are about depth of backend systems thinking * Solid understanding of payments infrastructure or developer platform engineering — you know what it takes to build for third-party integrators * Strong written and verbal communication; you can make complex technical decisions legible to non-technical stakeholders ✅ A TYPICAL INTERVIEW PROCESS * An initial intro call with a Talent Partner * An interview with the Hiring Manager * Challenge Stage - Contextualised to the role * A final, values-alignment interview WHAT'S THE CULTURE LIKE AT PRIMER? We're building a culture where people can do their best work and be proud of the impact they have. You'll be working with people who are mission-driven, smart, and reflective, and who are genuinely invested in building exceptional products and delivering success for our merchants. We work remotely, and have done since day one. We believe that building a successful, profitable company goes beyond proximity. We invest in our relationships through great remote working practices and thoughtfully designed face-to-face time, including workations, our annual company retreat, and access to co-working spaces across most major cities. The work is challenging. Scaleups are a challenge, and building category-defining products is a challenge. But there's a meaningful difference between a challenge and a struggle. At Primer, the right challenge comes with the right support: strong onboarding, a collaborative environment, and a team that is genuinely invested in your success. It's never something you face alone. OUR BENEFITS 🌍 We are fully remote and globally distributed; and have been since day one 💰 Competitive share options 🌴 Uncapped holiday, with 25 days minimum to be taken 🗣️ Co-working space access across major cities 📅 Workations & Company Retreat 💻 The best equipment for your role 🏠 £500 towards your home office setup 🔎 Generous learning budget 🏥 Private Medical Insurance 📈 A broad set of additional perks and benefits (depending on location) DON’T MEET EVERY SINGLE REQUIREMENT? At Primer, we're dedicated to building a diverse, inclusive, and authentic workplace. If you're excited about this role but your experience doesn't align perfectly with every qualification listed, we encourage you to apply. You may be the right candidate for this or other roles. Primer is committed to the equal treatment of all current and prospective employees and adopts a zero-tolerance approach to discrimination, regardless of age, disability, sex, sexual orientation, pregnancy and maternity, race or ethnicity, religion or belief, gender identity, marriage and civil partnership, or any other background or belief.