Staff Backend Engineer - Scalable Data Storage (Remote)

Affirm, Inc.; Northern (KY); Hybrid; USD 204,000 - 264,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health care coverage

Flexible Spending Wallets

Time off

Employee stock purchase plan (ESPP)

Job summary

Affirm, Inc. is seeking a Staff Software Engineer, Backend (Online Storage) to lead the technical roadmap for databases and storage platforms. You will design scalable relational and key-value data services, optimize performance, and collaborate across product, infra, and SRE to deliver resilient, global data infrastructure.

The role emphasizes ownership, high-availability systems, cloud-native architectures, and mentoring teammates in a remote-first, flexible work environment.

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/Distributed SQL such as MySQL, PostgreSQL, TiDB/Vitess.
• Strong background in building and operating databases in cloud environments and data access optimization.

Responsibilities

• Set technical strategy for the team on a year-long horizon and align with business goals.
• Design and build components of a scalable datastore platform with multi-region, horizontally scalable architecture.
• Collaborate with product, infra, and SRE to deliver high-availability data services and migrations.
• Establish monitoring, runbooks, testing and incident response to keep systems healthy.
• Drive code quality, design standards and knowledge sharing across teams.

Skills

Backend systems design

Distributed systems

Cloud architectures

Python

Kotlin

Code quality

Education

Bachelor's degree or equivalent practical experience

Tools

AWS

MySQL

Spark

Kubernetes

ProxySQL

RDS Proxy

PgBouncer

Job description

Affirm, Inc. is seeking a Staff Software Engineer, Backend (Online Storage) to lead the technical roadmap for databases and storage platforms. You will design scalable relational and key-value data services, optimize performance, and collaborate across product, infra, and SRE to deliver resilient, global data infrastructure.

The role emphasizes ownership, high-availability systems, cloud-native architectures, and mentoring teammates in a remote-first, flexible work environment.