Staff Backend Engineer, Scalable Databases

Affirm

New York (NY)

On-site

USD 180,000 - 240,000

Full time

3 days ago

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Job summary

Affirm is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to drive the technical roadmap for our Databases (Relational and KeyValue) and to build scalable, high-performance datastore platforms. You will work across products, infra, and SRE to deliver reliable data infrastructure for OLTP/OLAP workloads, focusing on MySQL, TiDB/Vitess, and distributed systems.

You will own operations, tooling, and reliability at scale, mentoring engineers and shaping coding standards.

Qualifications

8+ years of experience designing, developing and launching backend systems at scale using Python or Kotlin.
5+ years of hands-on Database Expertise, including MySQL/PostgreSQL, with performance tuning and data access patterns.
Strong experience with AWS, Spark, and Kubernetes in cloud-native environments.

Responsibilities

Set technical strategy for your team on a year-long time scale and align it with critical projects.
Collaborate with product, infrastructure, and SRE to deliver scalable datastore solutions.
Design and build components of a multi-region, horizontally scalable datastore platform.
Develop control planes for management of hundreds of databases, automation of migrations, DR, sharding.
Mentor teammates, enforce code review and design standards, and drive engineering excellence.