Staff Backend Engineer – Scalable DB Platforms (Remote)

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

Benefits offered by this job

Health care coverage

Flexible Spending Wallets

Paid time off

ESPP

Job summary

Affirm is seeking a Staff Software Engineer who will drive the technical roadmap for our Databases platform (Relational and Key‑Value). You’ll design scalable, multi‑region datastore solutions and collaborate with product, infrastructure, and SRE teams to deliver dependable data services for affirm’s checkout and analytics.

You’ll own operations and availability, establish coding and design standards, lead migrations and performance tuning, and mentor peers as we move toward ever more scalable,

Qualifications

• 8+ years designing, developing, and launching backend systems at scale using Python or Kotlin.
• Extensive distributed systems experience with AWS, MySQL, Spark, and Kubernetes.
• 5+ years of database expertise (Relational/Distributed SQL) incl. MySQL, PostgreSQL, TiDB/Vitess.
• Proven track record delivering major features and writing high‑quality code.
• Excellent communication and ability to operate across teams in ambiguous environments.

Responsibilities

• Set a year‑long technical strategy for the Online Storage team.
• Collaborate with product, infrastructure, and SRE teams across the org.
• Design and build scalable datastore components and multi‑region solutions.
• Develop control planes for managing hundreds of databases at scale.
• Ensure monitoring, runbooks, and on‑call readiness is in place.
• Promote code quality and design standards across teams.

Skills

Backend design

Distributed systems

Python/Kotlin

AWS

MySQL

Spark

Kubernetes

Education

Bachelor’s degree or equivalent

Tools

ProxySQL

RDS Proxy

PgBouncer

Job description

Affirm is seeking a Staff Software Engineer who will drive the technical roadmap for our Databases platform (Relational and Key‑Value). You’ll design scalable, multi‑region datastore solutions and collaborate with product, infrastructure, and SRE teams to deliver dependable data services for affirm’s checkout and analytics.

You’ll own operations and availability, establish coding and design standards, lead migrations and performance tuning, and mentor peers as we move toward ever more scalable,