Staff Backend Engineer, Scalable Datastore Platform

Affirm; Raleigh (NC); On-site; USD 180,000 - 280,000; Full time

Job summary

Affirm is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to lead the data storage platform, focusing on relational and key-value databases across multi-region deployments. You will set technical strategy, drive architecture, and partner with product, infrastructure, and SRE to deliver scalable datastore solutions.

Ideal candidates have 8+ years building backend systems at scale with Python or Kotlin, deep database expertise (MySQL, PostgreSQL, TiDB/Vitess), and strong cloud experience in AWS.

Qualifications

• 8+ years designing, developing and launching backend systems at scale using Python or Kotlin.
• Extensive experience building highly available distributed systems with AWS, MySQL, Spark and Kubernetes.
• 5+ years in database expertise (MySQL, PostgreSQL, TiDB/Vitess) including schema design, tuning, and scaling.
• Experience delivering features through technical and execution plans with production-quality code.
• Comfort with ambiguity and scaling large systems from low-level code to architecture.

Responsibilities

• Set technical strategy for your team on a year-long horizon and align with business goals.
• Design and build scalable datastore components, enabling multi-region, globally available platforms.
• Develop control planes for automated schema migrations, DR, sharding, and performance tuning.
• Collaborate with product, infrastructure, and SRE to ensure sustainable, safe data platforms.
• Own operations: monitoring, on-call readiness, runbooks, and incident response.
• Advocate for code quality and design standards across teams through writing and talks.
• Mentor teammates and help develop talent through feedback and leadership.
• Drive capacity planning, benchmarking, and load testing for database platforms.

Skills

Python

Kotlin

Distributed systems

AWS

MySQL

PostgreSQL

Spark

Kubernetes

TiDB/Vitess

Database tuning

Education

Bachelor's degree or equivalent

Tools

ProxySQL

RDS Proxy

PgBouncer

Job description

Affirm is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to lead the data storage platform, focusing on relational and key-value databases across multi-region deployments. You will set technical strategy, drive architecture, and partner with product, infrastructure, and SRE to deliver scalable datastore solutions.

Ideal candidates have 8+ years building backend systems at scale with Python or Kotlin, deep database expertise (MySQL, PostgreSQL, TiDB/Vitess), and strong cloud experience in AWS.