Staff Backend Engineer, Databases & Data Platforms

Affirm; Miami (FL); On-site; USD 180,000 - 230,000; Full time

Job summary

Affirm is seeking a talented Staff Software Engineer to lead the technical roadmap for our Databases (Relational and KeyValue). You will shape multi-region, high-performance datastore strategies and guide system design across global deployments.

You will drive improvements in MySQL, TiDB/Vitess and related tooling, mentor engineers, and partner with product, SRE, and analytics teams to ensure reliability and scale for affirm’s financial services platform.

Qualifications

• 8+ years designing, developing and launching backend systems at scale.
• Extensive experience with AWS, MySQL, Spark and Kubernetes.
• 5+ years database expertise including relational/distributed SQL (MySQL, PostgreSQL, TiDB/Vitess).
• Strong knowledge of schema design, query optimization and sharding.
• Experience delivering major features with high-quality code.
• Ability to operate in ambiguity and communicate across teams.

Responsibilities

• Set technical strategy for the team on a year-long timeline.
• Collaborate with product, infrastructure and SRE teams.
• Design and build scalable datastore components for multi-region deployments.
• Develop control planes for hundreds of databases and automate migrations.
• Collaborate with product, design and analytics to manage trade-offs.
• Champion code quality and drive architectural ownership.
• Own operations and on-call readiness with monitoring and runbooks.

Skills

Python

Kotlin

Distributed systems

AWS

MySQL

Spark

Kubernetes

Education

Bachelor's degree in related field

Tools

ProxySQL

PgBouncer

RDS Proxy

Vitess/TiDB

Job description

Affirm is seeking a talented Staff Software Engineer to lead the technical roadmap for our Databases (Relational and KeyValue). You will shape multi-region, high-performance datastore strategies and guide system design across global deployments.

You will drive improvements in MySQL, TiDB/Vitess and related tooling, mentor engineers, and partner with product, SRE, and analytics teams to ensure reliability and scale for affirm’s financial services platform.