Staff Backend Engineer: Scale Distributed DBs (Remote)

Affirm; Austin (TX); On-site; USD 204,000 - 264,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health coverage for dependents

Equity

Job summary

Affirm is seeking a Staff Software Engineer for the Online Storage/Databases team to drive the technical roadmap of our relational and key-value datastore platforms. You will own design and implementation of scalable data infrastructure across OLTP/OLAP systems, partnering with product, infrastructure, and SRE to ensure reliability at scale.

With 8+ years building backend systems and 5+ years in database expertise, you will influence architecture and standards, mentor teammates, and shape how we

Qualifications

• 8+ years of experience designing, developing and launching backend systems at scale using languages like Python or Kotlin.
• Extensive track record of developing highly available distributed systems using AWS, MySQL, Spark and Kubernetes.
• 5+ years of hands-on Database Expertise, with Relational/Distributed SQL (MySQL, PostgreSQL, TiDB/Vitess) and performance tuning.
• Strong background building and operating databases in cloud environments with benchmarking, load testing, and capacity planning.
• Familiarity with connection poolers and proxies such as ProxySQL, RDS Proxy, PgBouncer, etc.

Responsibilities

• Set technical strategy for the team on a year-long horizon and align with critical business projects.
• Collaborate with product, infrastructure, and SRE teams to deliver scalable datastore solutions.
• Design and build components of a scalable datastore platform for multi-region, globally available deployments.
• Develop control planes for management and self-service of hundreds of databases at scale, including migrations and disaster recovery.
• Collaborate across teams to ensure technical sustainability, risks, and trade-offs are well understood.
• Advocate for robust operational processes, monitoring, runbooks, and on-call readiness.
• Foster a culture of quality through code reviews and internal knowledge sharing.
• Mentor teammates and develop talent through guidance and example.

Skills

Backend design

Distributed systems

Python

Kotlin

Database expertise

AWS

MySQL

Spark

Kubernetes

Communication skills

Education

Bachelor's degree or equivalent

Tools

ProxySQL

RDS Proxy

PgBouncer

Job description

Affirm is seeking a Staff Software Engineer for the Online Storage/Databases team to drive the technical roadmap of our relational and key-value datastore platforms. You will own design and implementation of scalable data infrastructure across OLTP/OLAP systems, partnering with product, infrastructure, and SRE to ensure reliability at scale.

With 8+ years building backend systems and 5+ years in database expertise, you will influence architecture and standards, mentor teammates, and shape how we