Staff Software Engineer, Backend (Online Storage)

Affirm, Inc.; Northern (KY); Hybrid; USD 204,000 - 264,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health care coverage

Flexible Spending Wallets

Time off

Employee stock purchase plan (ESPP)

Job summary

Affirm, Inc. is seeking a Staff Software Engineer, Backend (Online Storage) to lead the technical roadmap for databases and storage platforms. You will design scalable relational and key-value data services, optimize performance, and collaborate across product, infra, and SRE to deliver resilient, global data infrastructure.

The role emphasizes ownership, high-availability systems, cloud-native architectures, and mentoring teammates in a remote-first, flexible work environment.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of experience designing, developing and launching backend systems at scale using languages like Python or Kotlin.
• 5+ years of hands-on Database Expertise with Relational/Distributed SQL such as MySQL, PostgreSQL, TiDB/Vitess.
• Strong background in building and operating databases in cloud environments and data access optimization.

Responsibilities

• Set technical strategy for the team on a year-long horizon and align with business goals.
• Design and build components of a scalable datastore platform with multi-region, horizontally scalable architecture.
• Collaborate with product, infra, and SRE to deliver high-availability data services and migrations.
• Establish monitoring, runbooks, testing and incident response to keep systems healthy.
• Drive code quality, design standards and knowledge sharing across teams.

Skills

Backend systems design

Distributed systems

Cloud architectures

Python

Kotlin

Code quality

Education

Bachelor's degree or equivalent practical experience

Tools

AWS

MySQL

Spark

Kubernetes

ProxySQL

RDS Proxy

PgBouncer

Job description

Staff Software Engineer, Backend (Online Storage)

Remote US

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 Affirms 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 Affirms 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 Affirms 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

As an integral member of the Online Storage team,

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 Affirms 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 - 13

Employees new to Affirms typically come in at the start of the pay range. Affirms 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: $230,000 - $290,000 USA base pay range (all other U.S. states) per year: $204,000 - $264,000

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. Affirms in proximal roles have the flexibility to work remotely, but will occasionally be required to work out of their assigned Affirms office. A limited number of roles remain office-based due to the nature of their job responsibilities.

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 - Affirms 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 Affirms 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, Affirms will consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records.

As set forth in Affirms Equal Employment Opportunity policy,we do not discriminate on the basis of any protected group status under any applicable law.

Affirm is dedicated to building an inclusive culture where affirmers belong and have an equal opportunity to thrive.