Staff Backend Engineer - Scalable Datastore & Databases

Affirm

Madison (WI)

On-site

USD 150,000 - 210,000

Full time

6 days ago

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Job summary

Affirm is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to drive the technical roadmap for our Databases platform (Relational and Key-Value). You will shape scalable, multi-region datastore solutions and own critical infrastructure that supports billions of transactions across Affirm services.

You will partner with product, infrastructure, and SRE teams to design robust data systems, implement migrations, tuning, and high-availability patterns, and mentor engineers while promoting quality and ownership.

Qualifications

8+ years designing, developing and launching backend systems at scale.
5+ years of hands-on Database Expertise (Relational/Distributed SQL).
Proficient in Python or Kotlin for backend development.
Experience with AWS, MySQL, Spark, Kubernetes at scale.
Delivers features with clear technical and execution plans.
Thrives in ambiguity and communicates effectively.
Bachelor's degree or equivalent in a related field.

Responsibilities

Set technical strategy for the team on a year-long horizon and align with business goals.
Collaborate with product, infrastructure, and SRE on key initiatives.
Design and build scalable datastore components for multi-region use.
Develop control planes for self-service databases, migrations, and recovery.
Lead cross-team collaboration to ensure sustainability and trade-offs.
Own team operations, monitoring, playbooks, and on-call readiness.
Promote code quality and design standards across teams.
Mentor engineers and lead by example.