Staff Backend Engineer — Scalable Datastore Platform

Appletreeatl; Victoria; On-site; CAD 181,000 - 241,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health coverage for you or dependents

Monthly tech stipends

Flexible time off

Employee stock purchase plan

Job summary

Affirm is hiring a Staff Software Engineer to drive the technical roadmap for our Databases platform (Relational and KeyValue). You will influence multi-region datastore solutions, coordinate with product and SRE teams, and own scalable data infrastructure initiatives across OLTP/OLAP systems.

The role emphasizes leadership, design standards, and hands-on development with Python/Kotlin, AWS, and MySQL, in a remote-first environment across Canada.

Qualifications

• 8+ years designing, developing and launching backend systems at scale.
• 5+ years hands-on database expertise (Relational/Distributed SQL).
• Strong knowledge of AWS, MySQL, Spark, and Kubernetes.
• Bachelor’s degree or equivalent practical experience in a related field.

Responsibilities

• Set technical strategy for your team on a year-long horizon.
• Collaborate with product, infrastructure, and SRE teams.
• Design and build scalable datastore components for multi-region deployments.
• Develop control planes for automated schema/data migrations and DR.
• Collaborate with product, design and analytics to ensure sustainability and trade-offs.
• Advocate for technical solutions and operational processes across teams.
• Own team operations, monitoring, playbooks, and on-call readiness.
• Mentor engineers and promote a culture of quality and ownership.

Skills

Backend systems

Python/Kotlin

Distributed systems

Engineering leadership

Technical strategy

Education

Bachelor's degree or equivalent practical experience

Tools

AWS

MySQL

Spark

Kubernetes

Job description

Affirm is hiring a Staff Software Engineer to drive the technical roadmap for our Databases platform (Relational and KeyValue). You will influence multi-region datastore solutions, coordinate with product and SRE teams, and own scalable data infrastructure initiatives across OLTP/OLAP systems.

The role emphasizes leadership, design standards, and hands-on development with Python/Kotlin, AWS, and MySQL, in a remote-first environment across Canada.