Staff Software Engineer, Backend (Marketplace/App Experience) at Affirm
$204,000–$290,000from the description
Jul 21, 2026
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Jul 23, 2026
What this job asks for AI summary
A senior individual-contributor engineering role focused on building and owning search and recommendations surfaces within Affirm's shopping and advertising platform. The work spans backend distributed systems, consumer-facing UI, and the technical strategy that ties them together, including setting standards, mentoring teammates, and ensuring operational reliability. Best suited to an experienced engineer with a background in search or recommendation systems.
Staff level · 8+ years · Remote · Full-time
“or” means any one of them counts — you don't need all of them.
We read this from the posting text with AI. Skim the description below before ruling yourself out.
How this req sits in the market our data
Roughly 3,850 people nationally plausibly meet what this posting asks for (software developers). range 2,300–5,800
Applicant volume Moderate — A normal amount of company. The rare requirements below are what will separate a shortlisted application from the rest.
Rare in this occupation — lead with these, and say what you built with them.
Most people in this occupation already list these. Still required — just not what gets you shortlisted.
What the occupation pays Median $138,970 (middle half $107,524–$175,762). This posting is about at that midpoint.
Estimated from BLS employment for this occupation and area, per-skill prevalence across our listing corpus, and published wage benchmarks — as of Jul 28, 2026. It is a model, not a headcount.
Why we read it this way (5)
The role carries no explicit seniority level in the title ('Software Engineer' equivalent at grade P/Equity 13), but the scope — setting year-long technical strategy, acting as a force-multiplier across teams, and laying the foundation for an agentic platform — clearly exceeds Senior and maps to Staff.
Two compensation bands are given: USA Pacific (CA, WA, NY, NJ, CT) $230,000–$290,000 and USA Sapphire (all other U.S. states) $204,000–$264,000. The min/max fields reflect the full national range ($204,000–$290,000).
The 2+ years in search or recommendation engines is a stated requirement but is a sub-domain experience gate rather than a named technology; it is captured in the overall years minimum context and noted here rather than as a skill.
React is listed under the requirements section but framed as 'experience developing consumer experiences using UI frameworks like React', which reads as context/familiarity rather than a hard gate — treated as preferred accordingly.
Degree requirement is None: the posting explicitly accepts 'equivalent practical experience' in lieu of a Bachelor's degree.
Read the full posting
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