Staff Backend Engineer: Scalable Databases Platform

Affirm; Regina; On-site; CAD 181,000 - 241,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health care coverage

Flexible Spending Wallets

Time off

ESPP

Job summary

Affirm is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to drive the technical roadmap for our Databases (Relational and Key-Value) within the Online Storage team. You’ll shape scalable datastore solutions with multi-region, high-performance capabilities to support affirm’s data-heavy services.

You will partner with product, infra, and SRE, mentor engineers, and lead initiatives from architecture to implementation while ensuring reliability and cost-efficiency in a fast-growing financial tech environment.

Qualifications

• 8+ years designing, developing and launching backend systems at scale using Python or Kotlin.
• 5+ years of hands-on database expertise with Relational/Distributed SQL (MySQL, PostgreSQL, TiDB/Vitess).
• Experience building and operating databases in cloud environments.

Responsibilities

• Set technical strategy for the team on a year-long horizon.
• Collaborate with product, infra, and SRE teams.
• Design and build scalable datastore components for multi-region deployments.
• Develop control planes for hundreds of databases, including migrations and sharding.
• Lead architecture discussions and promote coding and design standards.

Skills

Backend design

Distributed systems

Python/Kotlin

AWS

Spark

Education

Bachelor's degree

Tools

MySQL

PostgreSQL

TiDB/Vitess

ProxySQL

RDS Proxy

PgBouncer

Kubernetes

Job description

Affirm is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to drive the technical roadmap for our Databases (Relational and Key-Value) within the Online Storage team. You’ll shape scalable datastore solutions with multi-region, high-performance capabilities to support affirm’s data-heavy services.

You will partner with product, infra, and SRE, mentor engineers, and lead initiatives from architecture to implementation while ensuring reliability and cost-efficiency in a fast-growing financial tech environment.