Staff Backend Engineer: Scalable Databases & Data Platform

Affirm; Pittsburgh (Allegheny County); On-site; USD 140,000 - 220,000; Full time

Job summary

Affirm is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to drive the technical roadmap for our Databases (Relational and KeyValue) and to build scalable, multi-region datastore platforms. You will lead design, implementation and operation of mission-critical infrastructure, collaborating with product, infrastructure, and SRE teams.

You will bring 8+ years in backend systems, deep database expertise, and fluency in Python or Kotlin, with strong cloud and distributed systems experience.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of experience designing, developing and launching backend systems at scale.

Responsibilities

• Set technical strategy for the team on a year-long time scale and align it with business-impacting projects.
• Collaborate with product, infrastructure, and SRE teams to deliver scalable datastore platform components.
• Design and build multi-region, horizontally scalable datastore solutions.
• Develop control planes for management and self-service of hundreds of databases at scale, including migrations, DR, sharding, and performance tuning.
• Collaborate with product management, design and analytics to ensure technical sustainability and clear trade-offs.
• Advocate for technical solutions and operational processes; own team availability and on-call readiness.
• Foster code quality through reviews and design standards and mentor team members.

Skills

Python

Kotlin

Distributed systems

AWS

MySQL

PostgreSQL

Spark

Kubernetes

Performance tuning

Education

Bachelor's degree or equivalent practical experience

Tools

AWS

MySQL

PostgreSQL

Spark

Kubernetes

ProxySQL

RDS Proxy

PgBouncer

Job description

Affirm is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to drive the technical roadmap for our Databases (Relational and KeyValue) and to build scalable, multi-region datastore platforms. You will lead design, implementation and operation of mission-critical infrastructure, collaborating with product, infrastructure, and SRE teams.

You will bring 8+ years in backend systems, deep database expertise, and fluency in Python or Kotlin, with strong cloud and distributed systems experience.