Senior Software Engineer I or II, Search & AI Services

With our growing customer base and our expansion into new markets and use cases, we have more to build than ever at Affinity as we execute on our vision to put relationship intelligence at every professional's fingertips.

As a Senior Software Engineer, you'll have the opportunity to push our product in new directions while also shaping the next iterations of the features our customers already love. You'll define the future of core pieces of our backend across areas like our data model, large-scale syncing and processing of data, and building infrastructure to deliver Python microservices at scale. From back-end algorithms, async workers to scalable applications to cloud infrastructure, you'll hone your skills across multiple domains while helping to drive forward the Affinity product and vision.

In this role, you will:

• Design, develop, and maintain Python-based microservices architecture to support the scalability and modularity of our applications in our K8s environment.
• Implement continuous integration and deployment (CI/CD) pipelines for automated build, test, and deployment of microservices.
• Configure and Manage infrastructure using IaC and work on integrations via APIs.
• Own product areas that are critical to the success of our customers and our business
• Collaborate with world-class engineering, product, and design teams, and work in a cross-functional team of DevOps, software engineers, Data and ML engineers. You'll have the opportunity to learn from a wide variety of experiences and, of course, to share your own.
• Grow your expertise and fluency with core pieces of technology across the full application stack.
• Identify performance bottlenecks and optimize the performance of microservices through code optimization, caching strategies, and infrastructure scaling.
• Implement monitoring solutions and logging mechanisms to ensure performance, availability, and reliability.
• Ensure best security practices including data protection, access control, and compliance requirements.

Qualifications

Don’t meet every single requirement? Studies have shown that women and people of color are less likely to apply to jobs unless they meet every qualification. At Affinity, we are dedicated to building a diverse, inclusive, and authentic workplace, so if you’re excited about this role, but your past experience doesn’t perfectly align with the qualifications above, we encourage you to apply anyways. You may be just the right candidate for this or other roles.

• 8+ years of experience as a software engineer, including familiarity with the different pieces of technology involved in building modern web applications.
• Extensive experience building microservices leveraging modern libraries in Python.
• You have experience with NoSQL data stores and solving problems at scale, while also possessing a solid understanding of relational data models.
• You have experience with containerization and Kubernetes for orchestration to deploy and management of microservices including code optimization, infrastructure scaling and caching strategies. ( eg. Docker, K8s, Kustomize, Helm)
• You have experience troubleshooting microservices leveraging logging, monitoring, distributed tracing and debugging tools ( eg, ELK, Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, Jaeger, Open Telemetry).
• You have experience working with API contracts (e.g. Swagger, Postman, Pytest, pdb)
• You’ve built real-time event streaming and messaging services and have integrated them seamlessly into products from the backend infrastructure to front-end clients. 
• You're excited to work collaboratively within engineering to deliver Search and AI features at scale.
• You take pride in delivering high-quality and powerful products to customers while also championing technical excellence.
• You have excellent communication skills with the ability to break down complex technical projects into smaller deliverables. 

Nice to have

• Prior experience with Vector databases and ML operations.
• Prior experience with Search architecture of a high-performance search infrastructure prioritizing scalability, reliability, and efficiency. 
• Experience with Apache Lucene, ElasticSearch, OpenSearch, DSLs, Query Engines is a strong plus 
• You have an interest in and previously delivered machine learning projects to production, and have an understanding of how to deploy to cloud platforms like Vertex AI, AWS Sagemaker and AWS Bedrock.
• Experience with Ruby.

Tech stack

Our platform is built with React and TypeScript on the front end, and with Ruby and PostgreSQL on the back end. Our data platform utilizes Kafka, AWS SQS, Redis, Databricks, Spark, and AWS technologies such as SageMaker. Our infrastructure is deployed using Terraform and Python for serverless and is hosted on AWS and runs on Kubernetes (EKS).

How we work:

Our culture is a key part of how we operate as well as our hiring process:

• We iterate quickly. As such, you must be comfortable embracing ambiguity, be able to cut through it, and deliver incremental value to our customers each sprint.
• We are candid, transparent, and speak our minds while simultaneously caring personally with each person we interact with. 
• We make data-driven decisions and make the best decision for the moment based on the information available.

Join us in enabling every professional on the planet to succeed by harnessing the power of their relationships.If you’d want to learn more about our values click here.

What you'll enjoy at Affinity:

• We live our values as playmakers, obsessed with learning, caring personally about our colleagues and clients, are radically open-minded, and take pride in everything we do.
• We pay your medical, dental, and vision insurance with comprehensive PPO and HMO plans. And provide flexible personal & sick days. We want our team to be happy and healthy :)
• We offer a 401k plan to help you plan for retirement.
• We provide an annual budget for you to spend on education and offer a comprehensive L&D program – after all, one of our core values is that we're #obsessedwithlearning!
• We support our employee's overall health and well-being and reimburse monthly for things such as; transportation, Home Internet, Meals, and Wellness memberships/equipment.
• Virtual team building and socials. Keeping people connected is essential.

Please note that the role compensation details below reflect the base salary only and do not include any equity, or benefits. This represents the salary range that Affinity believes, in good faith, at the time of this posting, that it will pay for the posted job.

A reasonable estimate of the current range is $113,800 - $187,800 CAD. Within the range, individual pay depends on various factors including geographical location and review of experience, knowledge, skills, abilities of the applicant.