Staff Backend Engineer — Scalable Datastore Platform

Affirm; Boise (ID); On-site; USD 200,000 - 260,000; Full time

Job summary

Affirm is building honest, flexible financing. We seek a Staff Software Engineer to lead the Databases team, shaping the technical roadmap for Relational and KeyValue stores and driving scalable, high-performance data platforms. You will influence architecture, reliability, and collaboration across product and SRE.

You will own operations, coaching, and design standards, ensuring data integrity and efficient migrations while delivering impactful features in a fast-paced fintech environment.

Qualifications

• 8+ years designing, developing and launching backend systems at scale.
• Extensive experience with AWS, MySQL, Spark and Kubernetes.
• 5+ years with Relational/Distributed SQL databases and performance tuning.
• Ability to design scalable datastore components and multi-region systems.
• Strong communication and collaboration across teams.

Responsibilities

• Set technical strategy for the team on a yearly horizon.
• Design and build scalable datastore components and migrations.
• Collaborate with product, infrastructure and SRE teams.
• Own operations, monitoring, and on-call readiness.
• Mentor teammates and drive high-quality code reviews.

Skills

Backend design

Distributed systems

Kubernetes

MySQL/PostgreSQL

Python/Kotlin

Education

Bachelor's degree

Tools

AWS

Spark

ProxySQL

RDS

Vitess

Job description

Affirm is building honest, flexible financing. We seek a Staff Software Engineer to lead the Databases team, shaping the technical roadmap for Relational and KeyValue stores and driving scalable, high-performance data platforms. You will influence architecture, reliability, and collaboration across product and SRE.

You will own operations, coaching, and design standards, ensuring data integrity and efficient migrations while delivering impactful features in a fast-paced fintech environment.