Staff Backend Engineer, Scalable Datastore Platform

Affirm; Cleveland (OH); On-site; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

Affirm is seeking a highly skilled Staff Software Engineer to drive the technical roadmap for our Databases (Relational and KeyValue). You will influence the architecture, scale, and reliability of critical data platforms across OLTP/OLAP environments.

Lead efforts to optimize database performance, implement robust data access patterns, and guide capacity planning while collaborating with product, infrastructure, and SRE teams to ensure system resilience and operational excellence.

Qualifications

• 8+ years designing, developing and launching backend systems at scale.
• 5+ years of hands-on Database Expertise with Relational and/or Distributed SQL.
• Extensive experience with AWS, MySQL, Spark and Kubernetes.
• Strong communication skills and ability to thrive in ambiguity.

Responsibilities

• Set technical strategy for the team on a year-long horizon.
• Collaborate with product, infrastructure and SRE teams.
• Design and build scalable datastore components for relational and key-value databases.
• Develop control planes for management, migrations, DR, sharding and performance tuning.
• Collaborate across teams in the product development lifecycle for sustainable architectures.
• Advocate for technical solutions and operational processes to the wider organization.
• Own team operations, monitoring, on-call readiness and runbooks.
• Mentor and develop team members through feedback and leadership by example.

Skills

Python

Kotlin

Distributed systems

AWS

MySQL

Spark

Kubernetes

Code quality

Education

Bachelor's degree in related field

Tools

ProxySQL

RDS Proxy

PgBouncer

Job description

Affirm is seeking a highly skilled Staff Software Engineer to drive the technical roadmap for our Databases (Relational and KeyValue). You will influence the architecture, scale, and reliability of critical data platforms across OLTP/OLAP environments.

Lead efforts to optimize database performance, implement robust data access patterns, and guide capacity planning while collaborating with product, infrastructure, and SRE teams to ensure system resilience and operational excellence.