Staff Backend Engineer - Distributed Databases & Scale

Affirm; Washington (District of Columbia); On-site; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

Affirm is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to drive the technical roadmap for our Databases platform (Relational and KeyValue). You will shape, implement, and operate scalable datastore solutions across multi-region deployments, collaborating with product, infrastructure, and analytics teams to ensure reliability and performance.

You will mentor engineers, contribute to architecture decisions, optimize database performance, and advocate for quality and ownership across the organization.

Qualifications

• 8+ years designing backend systems at scale using languages like Python or Kotlin.
• 5+ years hands-on Database Expertise with Relational/Distributed SQL (MySQL, PostgreSQL, TiDB/Vitess).
• Experience delivering features and writing high quality, maintainable code.

Responsibilities

• Set technical strategy for your team on a year-long time scale and align with critical, business-impacting projects.
• Collaborate with product, infrastructure, and SRE teams to deliver on goals.
• Design and build scalable datastore components for multi-region, high-performance datastore solutions.

Skills

Python

Kotlin

Education

Bachelor's degree or equivalent

Tools

AWS

MySQL

Spark

Kubernetes

ProxySQL

RDS Proxy

PgBouncer

Job description

Affirm is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to drive the technical roadmap for our Databases platform (Relational and KeyValue). You will shape, implement, and operate scalable datastore solutions across multi-region deployments, collaborating with product, infrastructure, and analytics teams to ensure reliability and performance.

You will mentor engineers, contribute to architecture decisions, optimize database performance, and advocate for quality and ownership across the organization.