Senior Backend Architect – Distributed Databases (Remote)

Affirm; Seattle (WA); On-site; USD 230,000 - 290,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health care coverage

Flexible Spending Wallets

Time off

Employee stock purchase plan

Job summary

Affirm is seeking a highly skilled Staff Software Engineer to drive the technical roadmap for our Databases (Relational and KeyValue). You will design scalable, multi-region datastore platforms and lead efforts to improve performance and reliability across OLTP/OLAP systems.

You will collaborate with product, analytics, and infrastructure teams to ensure sustainable architecture, efficient data access patterns, and robust operational practices.

Qualifications

• 8+ years designing, developing and launching backend systems at scale using Python or Kotlin.
• 5+ years of hands-on database expertise with Relational/Distributed SQL (MySQL, PostgreSQL, TiDB/Vitess).
• Ability to design scalable datastore platforms and optimize data access patterns across cloud environments.

Responsibilities

• Set technical strategy for your team and align with critical projects.
• Collaborate with product, infrastructure, and SRE teams to deliver reliable datastore solutions.
• Design and build scalable datastore components for multi-region, globally available systems.
• Develop control planes for self-service databases, migrations, disaster recovery, and tuning.
• Lead cross-team collaboration in product development with analytics and design.
• Promote code quality, design standards, and on-call readiness.

Skills

Python

Kotlin

Distributed systems

AWS

MySQL

Spark

Kubernetes

Data modeling

Education

Bachelor's degree

Tools

ProxySQL

RDS Proxy

PgBouncer

Vitess

Job description

Affirm is seeking a highly skilled Staff Software Engineer to drive the technical roadmap for our Databases (Relational and KeyValue). You will design scalable, multi-region datastore platforms and lead efforts to improve performance and reliability across OLTP/OLAP systems.

You will collaborate with product, analytics, and infrastructure teams to ensure sustainable architecture, efficient data access patterns, and robust operational practices.