Senior Software Engineer (Online Storage)

Affirm; United States; Remote; USD 150,000 - 200,000; Full time

Job summary

A leading financial services company is seeking a senior software engineer with expertise in large-scale database deployments. The position focuses on improving database architecture and scalability. Ideal candidates will have experience in distributed databases and be comfortable mentoring junior engineers. This remote-first role offers a competitive salary and numerous benefits including health coverage and stock options.

Benefits

Subsidized health, dental, and vision coverage

Flexible spending wallets

Employee stock purchase plan (ESPP)

Qualifications

• 5+ years of software engineering experience.
• Hands-on experience with large-scale database deployments.
• Expertise in distributed databases.

Responsibilities

• Lead projects to improve database architecture.
• Work with engineers managing distributed database technologies.
• Design scalable database systems.

Skills

Software engineering experience

Database expertise

Leadership and mentoring

SQL optimization

Communication skills

Education

Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science

Tools

AWS Aurora

Postgres

Terraform

Kubernetes

Python

Job description

Overview

Affirm is reinventing credit to make it more honest and friendly, giving consumers the flexibility to buy now and pay later without hidden fees or compounding interest. At Affirm, data is fundamental to everything we do. Our data and storage solutions empower machine learning, AI, cloud-based technologies, and other modern tools to create differential and scalable products. We prioritize building our own technology and investing in engineering talent as enduring competitive advantages. We source, aggregate, protect, and analyze data to inform analysis and decision-making, including risk assessment, in a way that empowers consumers and generates value for merchants and funding sources.

The Online Storage team provides a set of managed databases as a platform to persist data for all Affirm services. Our platform automates operations and development on services on top of storage systems like AWS Aurora (MySQL), DynamoDB, and S3. We handle various data and access patterns, including mission-critical financial transactional data, data science models, and new persistence use cases requiring deep expertise in database systems. Our mission is to provide trustworthy, intuitive, and cost-efficient solutions to secure, store, analyze, and transform data at exceptional scale.

Affirm is growing fast and we want you to enable us to scale our products to 10x and beyond through building world-class systems which enable Affirm in its mission to provide honest financial products which improve lives. We are just getting started—join us as we build a beloved, lasting financial services brand predicated on honesty and trust.

What you’ll do

As a member of the Online Storage team, you will combine a strong understanding of application architecture, smooth developer experiences, and fast-paced execution to deliver a powerful self-serve system to help Affirm scale easily. You will apply a customer-centric approach across the engineering organization to craft and execute a long-term roadmap.

As a member of the Online Storage team, you will collaborate with other teams including product, infrastructure, and site reliability engineering (SRE) to:

• Lead projects towards improving our database architecture, focusing on scalability, reliability, performance, and cost efficiency.
• Work with engineers managing Affirm’s distributed database technologies, particularly AWS Aurora MySQL, Distributed SQL, and expanding to DynamoDB and caching.
• Design, build, and operate durable and strongly consistent database-as-a-service architecture.
• Design and build scalable solutions for multi-region, active resharding, and globally available services.
• Work closely with product teams to translate business requirements into robust database solutions.
• Assist partners in achieving better query performance through query optimization and effective schemas.
• Develop and enforce best practices in database design and management, ensuring data integrity, security, and performance.
• Stay abreast of industry trends and emerging technologies in transactional databases to enhance systems and processes.
• Participate in an on-call rotation and collaborate with SRE to resolve production issues.
• Lead and mentor engineers to define and execute a roadmap aligned with stakeholder needs.

You will also have opportunities to learn bleeding-edge open source technologies as we build the future of Affirm’s Online Storage platform.

What we look for

• Bachelors or Masters degree in Computer Science with 5+ years of software engineering experience, including leadership exposure and mentoring junior engineers.
• In-depth, hands-on experience with large-scale database deployments in production.
• Expertise in distributed databases and technologies such as MySQL InnoDB storage (preferred), Postgres, Spanner, Vitess, TiDB, CockroachDB, etc.
• Solid understanding of distributed database architecture, data modeling, and performance tuning, including SQL optimization techniques.
• Expertise in database backup and recovery management.
• Experience with database benchmarking, load testing, and capacity planning.
• Familiarity with connection poolers and proxies such as ProxySQL, RDS Proxy, PgBouncer, etc.
• Proficiency in Python or Kotlin (or both).
• Experience with AWS and Kubernetes.
• Experience building software with infrastructure-as-code frameworks and tools (e.g., Terraform or Crossplane).
• Exceptional communication skills with the ability to engage effectively with technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Experience creating and triaging database alerts, identifying root causes, and implementing corrective solutions.

What you’ll learn

Join us as we build a beloved, lasting financial services company predicated on honesty and trust. In this role, you’ll understand the challenges of helping a fast-growing company move toward service-oriented architecture, focusing on scaling and availability of infrastructural components.

Please note: this role may include information about work from specific team initiatives and internal case studies where applicable.

Pay and Benefits

Base pay range for CAN: $150,000 - $200,000 per year. Equity opportunities may be included. Affirm is remote-first; most roles are remote within the country of employment, with some roles requiring occasional office presence. Benefits include subsidized health, dental, and vision coverage for employees and dependents, flexible spending wallets, time off, and an employee stock purchase plan (ESPP).

Affirm is an equal opportunity employer. We provide accommodations in the hiring process for candidates with disabilities. For U.S. positions that could be performed in Los Angeles or San Francisco, Affirm will consider qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records in accordance with local law.

By submitting your application, you acknowledge that you have read Affirm\'s Global Candidate Privacy Notice and consent to the collection, processing, use, and storage of your personal information as described therein.