Staff Software Engineer, Backend (Online Storage)

Affirm; Windsor; On-site; CAD 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

Affirm is seeking a highly skilled staff software engineer to own the technical roadmap for our relational and key-value databases. You will contribute to a scalable, multi-region datastore platform used across Affirm’s services, collaborating closely with product, infrastructure, and SRE teams to deliver robust data solutions.

You will drive design, implementation, and operation of mission-critical infrastructure, enabling self-service for hundreds of databases at scale and ensuring high

Qualifications

• Must be a highly skilled and detail-oriented staff software engineer.
• Able to drive technical roadmap and influence multiple teams.
• Experience designing scalable datastore platforms and multi-region deployments.
• Strong collaboration with product, infrastructure and SRE teams.

Responsibilities

• Set long-term technical strategy for the datastore platform.
• Design and build scalable, multi-region datastore components.
• Automate schema/data migrations, DR, sharding, and performance tuning.
• Collaborate across product, design and analytics to ensure sustainable solutions.

Skills

Leadership

Roadmap planning

Cross-team collaboration

System design

Tools

MySQL

DynamoDB

Redis

Distributed SQL

Job description

At affirm, we exist for the moments that matter—giving people a clear, predictable way to pay over time, with no hidden fees, no surprises, and no tradeoffs on what matters most.

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

• 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