Staff Software Engineer

Affirm; Phoenix (AZ); Remote; USD 200,000 - 250,000; Full time

Job summary

Join a leading financial services company as a Staff Software Engineer. You will be part of the Online Storage team, focusing on improving database architecture and collaborating across teams to deliver scalable solutions. This role emphasizes leadership, technical expertise, and a customer-centric approach, all while contributing to a mission of providing honest financial products. With a competitive salary range and comprehensive benefits, this position offers a unique opportunity to grow in a fast-paced environment.

Benefits

Health care coverage

Flexible Spending Wallets

Competitive vacation and holiday schedules

Employee stock purchase plan (ESPP)

Qualifications

• 7+ years of experience as a software engineer with leadership exposure.
• In-depth experience with large-scale database deployments.

Responsibilities

• Shape the technical direction and roadmap for database architecture.
• Design and build scalable database solutions.
• Work closely with product teams to translate business requirements.

Skills

Leadership

Communication

Problem Solving

Collaboration

Education

Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science

Tools

AWS

Kubernetes

Terraform

Job description

Join to apply for the Staff Software Engineer role at Affirm

2 days ago Be among the first 25 applicants

Join to apply for the Staff Software Engineer role at Affirm

Get AI-powered advice on this job and more exclusive features.

Affirm is reinventing credit to make it more honest and friendly, giving consumers the flexibility to buy now and pay later without any hidden fees or compounding interest.

At Affirm, data is fundamental to everything we do. Our data and storage solutions empower machine learning, artificial intelligence, cloud-based technologies, and other modern tools to create differential and scalable products. We prioritize building our own technology and investing in engineering talent, as we believe these are enduring competitive advantages that are difficult to replicate. Our expertise in sourcing, aggregating, protecting, and analyzing data has been what we believe to be a core competitive advantage of our platform since our founding. We use data to inform our analysis and decision-making, including risk assessment, in a way that empowers consumers and generates value for our merchants and funding sources.

The Online Storage team provides a set of managed databases as a platform, used to persist data for all Affirm services. Our platform automates operations and development on services on top of storage systems like AWS Aurora (MySQL), DynamoDB, and S3. As a team, we are responsible for various data and access patterns, including but not limited to mission-critical financial transactional data, data science models, and any new persistence use case requiring us to learn and gain deep expertise in various database systems. Our mission is to provide trustworthy, intuitive, and cost-efficient solutions to secure, store, analyze, and transform data at exceptional scale.

Affirm is growing fast and we want you to enable us to scale our products to 10x and beyond through building world-class systems which enable Affirm in its mission to provide honest financial products which improve lives.

We are only just getting started! Come join us as we build a beloved, lasting financial services brand predicated on honesty and trust. It’s going to be an amazing ride!

As a member of the Online Storage team, you will combine a strong understanding of application architecture, smooth developer experiences and fast-paced execution to deliver a powerful self-serve system to help Affirm scale easily. This will need you to apply a customer-centric approach across the engineering organization to help the team craft and execute on a long-term roadmap.

What you’ll do

As a Member Of The Online Storage Team, You Will Collaborate With Other Teams - Including Product, Infrastructure, And Site Reliability Engineering(SRE) To

• Shape the technical direction, strategy and roadmap towards improving our database architecture, focusing on scalability, reliability, performance, and cost efficiency.
• Working with engineers managing Affirm’s distributed database technologies, particularly AWS Aurora MySQL, Distributed SQL, and eventually expanding to DynamoDB and Caching.
• Design, build and highly durable and strongly consistent database as service architecture.
• Design and build solutions at scale for challenges such as multi-region, active resharding and globally available services.
• Work closely with product teams to understand business requirements and translate them into robust database solutions.
• Assist partners achieve better query performance by suggesting better query optimizations and effective schemas.
• Develop and enforce best practices in database design and management, ensuring data integrity, security, and optimal performance.
• Stay abreast of industry trends and emerging technologies in transactional databases to continually enhance our systems and processes.
• Participating in an on-call rotation and collaborating with other teams, such as SRE, to solve production issues.
• Leading and mentoring engineers to define and execute on roadmap aligned with stakeholder needs
  
  

You will also have the opportunity to learn bleeding edge open source technologies as we build the future of Affirm’s Online Storage platform.

What We Look For

• Bachelors or Masters degree in Computer Science with 7+ years of experience as a software engineer with leadership exposure and experience mentoring junior engineers.
• In-depth, hands-on experience with large-scale database deployments in a production environment.
• Expertise in distributed databases and database technologies such as MySQL InnoDB storage (Preferred), Postgres, Spanner, Vitess, TiDB, CockroachDB etc
• Solid understanding of distributed database architecture, data modeling, and performance tuning. Particularly, expertise in SQL tuning and performance optimization techniques.
• Expertise in Database/Table and backup-recovery management.
• Expertise in SQL tuning and performance optimization techniques.
• Expertise in database benchmarking, load testings, and capacity planning.
• Familiarity with connection poolers and proxies such as ProxySQL, RDS Proxy, Pg Bouncer, etc.
• Proficiency in Python or Kotlin or both.
• Experience with AWS and Kubernetes.
• Experience building software with IaC (terraform or crossplane) frameworks and tools
• Exceptional communication skills with the ability to engage effectively with both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Expertise to create and triage database alerts and issues, identify root causes, and implement corrective solutions.
• This position requires either equivalent practical experience or a Bachelor’s degree in a related field.
  
  

What You’ll Learn

Join us as we build a beloved, lasting financial services company predicated on honesty and trust. In this role, you’ll understand the exciting challenges of helping a fast-growing company move towards a service-oriented architecture - diving into the scaling and availability challenges of infrastructural components that are the fundamental building blocks of a large scale system. You’ll hone your ability to anticipate and recognize how to apply different technologies to solve a wide array of real world problems across the organization - all while building teams and working cross functionally with hardworking peers.

Please refer to some work from Online Storage Team https://tech.affirm.com/scaling-our-database-for-peak-season-a-60-latency-reduction-bonus-92d0b2b097f3

Pay Grade - P

Equity Grade - 13

Employees new to Affirm typically come in at the start of the pay range. Affirm focuses on providing a simple and transparent pay structure which is based on a variety of factors, including location, experience and job-related skills.

Base pay is part of a total compensation package that may include equity rewards, monthly stipends for health, wellness and tech spending, and benefits (including 100% subsidized medical coverage, dental and vision for you and your dependents.)

USA base pay range (CA, WA, NY, NJ, CT) per year: $225,000 - $275,000

USA base pay range (all other U.S. states) per year: $200,000 - $250,000

Affirm is proud to be a remote-first company! The majority of our roles are remote and you can work almost anywhere within the country of employment. Affirmers in proximal roles have the flexibility to work remotely, but will occasionally be required to work out of their assigned Affirm office. A limited number of roles remain office-based due to the nature of their job responsibilities.

Benefits

We’re extremely proud to offer competitive benefits that are anchored to our core value of people come first. Some key highlights of our benefits package include:

• Health care coverage - Affirm covers all premiums for all levels of coverage for you and your dependents
• Flexible Spending Wallets - generous stipends for spending on Technology, Food, various Lifestyle needs, and family forming expenses
• Time off - competitive vacation and holiday schedules allowing you to take time off to rest and recharge
• ESPP - An employee stock purchase plan enabling you to buy shares of Affirm at a discount
  
  

We believe It’s On Us to provide an inclusive interview experience for all, including people with disabilities. We are happy to provide reasonable accommodations to candidates in need of individualized support during the hiring process.

[For U.S. positions that could be performed in Los Angeles or San Francisco] Pursuant to the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance and Los Angeles Fair Chance Initiative for Hiring Ordinance, Affirm will consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records.

By clicking "Submit Application," you acknowledge that you have read Affirm's Global Candidate Privacy Notice and hereby freely and unambiguously give informed consent to the collection, processing, use, and storage of your personal information as described therein.

Seniority level

• Seniority level

  Mid-Senior level

Employment type

• Employment type

  Full-time

Job function

• Job function

  Engineering and Information Technology

Referrals increase your chances of interviewing at Affirm by 2x

Sign in to set job alerts for “Staff Software Engineer” roles.

Senior Software Engineer (Identity Decisioning)

FASI Senior Full Stack Software Developer

Staff Software Engineer, Full Stack (Agent Experience)

Senior Backend Software Developer (Remote)

Principal Software Engineer, Infrastructure Platform Engineering

Staff Software Engineer, Backend (Virtual Cards Platform)

Staff Software Engineer (Batch Infrastructure)

Senior Software Engineer - SRE, Backend (Reliability Engineering)

Senior Software Engineer - Digital Workplace

Embedded Linux Senior Software Engineer - Optimisation

Senior Staff Software Engineer, Backend (Discovery / Search)

Phoenix, AZ $120,000.00-$200,000.00 4 days ago

Goodyear, AZ $90,000.00-$150,000.00 1 week ago

Senior Staff Software Engineer, Backend (Online Storage)

Goodyear, AZ $120,000.00-$200,000.00 1 week ago

Phoenix, AZ $90,000.00-$150,000.00 4 days ago

Senior Staff Software Engineer, Backend (Identity Engineering)

Senior Staff Software Engineer, Fullstack (Consumer App Experience)

Senior Staff Software Engineer, Backend (Load Testing)

Senior Software Engineer (Experimentation Platform)

Senior Software Engineer (Online Storage)

Senior Software Engineer - Angular, PHP, AWS

Phoenix, AZ $150,000.00-$180,000.00 2 weeks ago

Senior Software Engineer (Merchant Risk Intelligence & Platform)

Senior Embedded Software Engineer - Rust

Tempe, AZ $89,300.00-$198,900.00 12 hours ago

We’re unlocking community knowledge in a new way. Experts add insights directly into each article, started with the help of AI.