Staff Software Engineer, Backend (Online Storage)

Affirm; Las Vegas (NV); On-site; USD 180,000 - 260,000; Full time

Job summary

Affirm is seeking a highly skilled Staff Software Engineer to drive the technical roadmap for our Databases platform (Relational and KeyValue). You will influence architecture, scale operations, and partner across product, infra, and SRE teams to deliver high-performance, reliable datastore solutions.

Top candidates have 8+ years building backend systems, deep database expertise, and a track record delivering major features at scale.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of experience designing, developing and launching backend systems at scale.
• 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).
• Strong knowledge of schema design, query optimization, sharding, partitioning and performance tuning.

Responsibilities

• Set technical strategy for the team on a year-long horizon and align with critical projects.
• Collaborate with product, infra, and SRE to deliver scalable datastore solutions.
• Design and build components for a multi-region, horizontally scalable datastore platform.
• Develop control planes for management, migrations, disaster recovery, and tuning at scale.
• Drive code quality, reviews, and best practices across the team.

Skills

Python

Kotlin

Distributed systems

AWS

MySQL

Spark

Kubernetes

Backend architecture

Education

Bachelor's degree

Tools

ProxySQL

RDS Proxy

Vitess

TiDB

Job description

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.

The Data and Storage Services team is responsible for affirm's data infrastructure across OLTP and OLAP systems, spanning critical online checkout databases, batch orchestration, streaming infrastructure, event-driven frameworks, BI, analytics tooling, large-scale data platforms, and agentic data tools such as semantic layers and internal platform data applications. Our mission is to provide trustworthy, intuitive, and cost-efficient solutions for affirmers to secure, store, analyze, and transform data at exceptional scale.

The Online Storage team provides a set of managed databases as a platform, used to persist data for all affirm services. Our platform enables self-service access to OLTP storage systems, including Relational DB (MySQL), DynamoDB, Distributed SQL, Cache (Redis). 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. These responsibilities require us to learn and gain deep expertise in various database systems.

We are looking for a highly skilled and detail-oriented Staff Software Engineer who can drive the technical roadmap for our Databases (Relational and KeyValue) identifying opportunities to improve how we build, productize, operate and improve this mission-critical infrastructure to unlock substantial value within our business. You'll have the opportunity to directly influence your team's roadmap in close collaboration with your peers, share your knowledge and expertise with others and learn from some of the best on our shared mission to deliver honest financial products that improve lives.

What You'll Do

• You will be responsible for setting technical strategy for your team on a year-long time scale, and help your team tie it together with critical, business-impacting projects.
• You will work closely with and contribute to other teams - including product, infrastructure, and site reliability engineering (SRE).
• You will design and build components of a scalable datastore platform, contributing to the overall affirm's goals, and leveraging experience in creating multi-region, horizontally scalable, globally available, and high-performance datastore solutions.
• You will develop control planes for management, self service of hundreds of databases at scale automating schema/data migrations, disaster recovery, sharding and performance tuning.
• You will collaborate across teams in the product development lifecycle, focusing on database solutions, by collaborating with product management, design & analytics to ensure technical sustainability, risks and trade-offs are well understood and managed.
• You will act as a force-multiplier for your team through your definition and advocacy of technical solutions and operational processes.
• You take ownership of your team's operations and availability by ensuring you have the right monitoring, triage rotations, playbooks, policies, testing and alerting in place to support "keep the lights on" & on-call efforts.
• You will foster a culture of quality and ownership on your team by setting code review and design standards for your team, and advocating for them beyond your team through your writing and tech talks.
• You will help develop talent on your team by providing feedback and guidance, and leading by example.

What We Look For

• You have 8+ years of experience designing, developing and launching backend systems at scale using languages like Python or Kotlin.
• You have an extensive track record of developing highly available distributed systems using technologies like AWS, MySQL, Spark and Kubernetes.
• You have 5+ years of hands-on Database Expertise, leveraging your deep knowledge of Relational and/or Distributed SQL such as MySQL, PostgreSQL, TiDB/Vitess to optimize database performance, ensuring data integrity, and implementing efficient data access patterns. Should possess deep understanding of Database fundamentals including schema design, query optimization, scaling, partitioning, sharding and performance tuning in multiple functional environments. Strong background and expertise in building and operating databases in cloud environments. Expertise in database benchmarking, load testing, and capacity planning. Familiarity with connection poolers and proxies such as ProxySQL, RDS Proxy, Pg Bouncer, etc.
• You have experience delivering major features, system components or deprecating existing functionality in a system through the definition of a technical and execution plan. You write high quality code that is easily understood and used by others.
• You thrive in ambiguity, and are comfortable moving from low level language idioms all the way to the architecture of large systems to understand how they work.
• Your growth and impact trajectory demonstrates that you have mastered gathering and iterating on feedback from your engineering and cross-functional peers.
• You have strong verbal and written communication skills that support effective collaboration with our global engineering team.
• This position requires either equivalent practical experience or a Bachelor's degree in a related field.

Base Pay Grade - P

Equity Grade -