Staff Backend Engineer: Scalable DB Platform (Remote)

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

Benefits offered by this job

Health coverage for you and dependents

Equity rewards

Remote-first company

ESPP – Employee Stock Purchase Plan

Job summary

Affirm is seeking a highly skilled staff software engineer to drive the technical roadmap for our databases, including relational and key-value storage. You will shape multi-region, horizontally scalable datastore platforms and own end-to-end operational excellence, working alongside product, design, and analytics teams.

You will influence architecture, mentor engineers, and advocate for robust monitoring, testing, and on-call practices while delivering high-impact features in a remote-first

Qualifications

• 8+ years designing, developing and launching backend systems at scale using Python or Kotlin.
• Extensive experience with AWS, MySQL, Spark, and Kubernetes for highly available distributed systems.
• 5+ years database expertise in relational and distributed SQL (MySQL, PostgreSQL, Vitess) and cloud DB ops.
• Proven ability to deliver major features with clear technical plans and high-quality code.

Responsibilities

• Set technical strategy for the team on a yearly horizon.
• Collaborate with product, infrastructure, and SRE teams.
• Design and build scalable datastore components for multi-region deployments.
• Develop control planes for database self-service, migrations, DR, sharding, and tuning.
• Lead code reviews and establish design standards across teams.
• Foster talent growth and provide hands-on guidance.

Skills

Python

Kotlin

Distributed systems

AWS

MySQL

Spark

Kubernetes

Education

Bachelor's degree or equivalent

Tools

ProxySQL

RDS Proxy

PgBouncer

Kubernetes

Job description

Affirm is seeking a highly skilled staff software engineer to drive the technical roadmap for our databases, including relational and key-value storage. You will shape multi-region, horizontally scalable datastore platforms and own end-to-end operational excellence, working alongside product, design, and analytics teams.

You will influence architecture, mentor engineers, and advocate for robust monitoring, testing, and on-call practices while delivering high-impact features in a remote-first