Staff Software Engineer, Backend (Online Storage)

Affirm; Vancouver; On-site; CAD 130,000 - 190,000; Full time

Job summary

Affirm is seeking a Staff Software Engineer for Backend (Online Storage) to drive the technical roadmap of relational and key-value databases across multi-region, highly available systems. You will shape datastore platforms, influence architecture decisions, and collaborate with product, infra and SRE teams to deliver trusted, scalable data infrastructure.

You will own operations, monitoring, and on-call readiness while mentoring others and contributing to high-impact data solutions that power

Qualifications

• Experience designing scalable backend services and datastore platforms.
• Proven ability to collaborate across product, infra and SRE teams.
• Strong knowledge of relational and key-value datastores at scale.

Responsibilities

• Set technical strategy for the team on a year-long horizon.
• Design and build components of a scalable datastore platform.
• collaborate with product, design, and analytics to ensure technical sustainability.
• Develop control planes for management and scale-out databases.
• Own operations, monitoring, runbooks and on-call readiness.
• Drive throughput, reliability and cost efficiency across storage services.

Skills

Distributed systems

Data modeling

Backend architecture

Go/Java

Cross-team collaboration

Tools

MySQL

DynamoDB

Redis

SQL/NoSQL

Job description

Staff Software Engineer, Backend (Online Storage)

Remote Canada

Affirm is reinventing credit to make it more honest and friendly, giving consumers the flexibility to buy now and pay later without any hidden fees or compounding interest.

The Data and Storage Services team is responsible for Affirm's data infrastructure across OLTP and OLAP systems, spanning critical online checkout databases, batch orchestration, streaming infrastructure, event-driven frameworks, BI, analytics tooling, large-scale data platforms, and agentic data tools such as semantic layers and internal platform data applications. Our mission is to provide trustworthy, intuitive, and cost-efficient solutions for Affirmers to secure, store, analyze, and transform data at exceptional scale.

The Online Storage team provides a set of managed databases as a platform, used to persist data for all affirm services. Our platform enables self-service access to OLTP storage systems, including Relational DB(MySQL), DynamoDB, Distributed SQL, Cache(Redis). As a team, we are responsible for various data and access patterns, including but not limited to mission-critical financial transactional data, data science models, and any new persistence use case. These responsibilities require us to learn and gain deep expertise in various database systems.

We are looking for a highly skilled and detail-oriented Staff Software Engineer who can drive the technical roadmap for our Databases (Relational and KeyValue) identifying opportunities to improve how we build, productize, operate and improve this mission-critical infrastructure to unlock substantial value within our business. You’ll have the opportunity to directly influence your team’s roadmap in close collaboration with your peers, share your knowledge and expertise with others and learn from some of the best on our shared mission to deliver honest financial products that improve lives.

What You’ll Do

As an integral member of the Online Storage team,

You will be responsible for setting technical strategy for your team on a year-long time scale, and help your team tie it together with critical, business-impacting projects.

You will work closely with and contribute to other teams - including product, infrastructure, and site reliability engineering (SRE).

You will design and build components of a scalable datastore platform, contributing to the overall affirm's goals, and leveraging experience in creating multi-region, horizontally scalable, globally available, and high-performance datastore solutions.

You will develop control planes for management, self service of hundreds of databases at scale automating schema/data migrations, disaster recovery, sharding and performance tuning.

You will collaborate across teams in the product development lifecycle, focusing on database solutions, by collaborating with product management, design & analytics to ensure technical sustainability, risks and trade-offs are well understood and managed.

You will act as a force-multiplier for your team through your definition and advocacy of technical solutions and operational processes.

You take ownership of your team’s operations and availability by ensuring you have the right monitoring, triage rotations, playbooks, policies, testing and alerting in place to support “keep the lights on” & on-call efforts.

You will foster