Staff Backend Engineer, Global DB Platforms (Remote)

Affirm; San Jose (CA); 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 Staff Software Engineer to drive the Databases platform, focusing on Relational and KeyValue stores like MySQL and Redis-backed systems. You will design scalable components, own technical strategy, and partner with product, infrastructure, and SRE to evolve mission-critical data infrastructure.

Expect ownership, high impact, and remote-first collaboration across the US. Ideal candidates have 8+ years in backend systems, 5+ years with databases, and deep cloud experience.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of experience designing, developing and launching backend systems at scale using languages like Python or Kotlin.
• 5+ years of hands-on database expertise with Relational and/or Distributed SQL such as MySQL, PostgreSQL, TiDB/Vitess.
• Experience with AWS, Spark, Kubernetes and building highly available distributed systems.

Responsibilities

• Set technical strategy for the team on a year-long horizon and tie it to business-impacting projects.
• Collaborate with product, infrastructure, and SRE to deliver scalable datastore components.
• Build control planes for management and self-service of hundreds of databases at scale, including migrations, DR, sharding and performance tuning.

Skills

Backend systems

Distributed systems

Python

Kotlin

Education

Bachelor's degree

Tools

ProxySQL

RDS Proxy

PgBouncer

Job description

Affirm is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to drive the Databases platform, focusing on Relational and KeyValue stores like MySQL and Redis-backed systems. You will design scalable components, own technical strategy, and partner with product, infrastructure, and SRE to evolve mission-critical data infrastructure.

Expect ownership, high impact, and remote-first collaboration across the US. Ideal candidates have 8+ years in backend systems, 5+ years with databases, and deep cloud experience.