Senior Software Engineer, Backend (Online Storage)

About the Position

At Affirm, we exist for the moments that matter-giving people a clear, predictable way to pay over time, with no hidden fees, no surprises, and no tradeoffs on what matters most.

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), KV(DynamoDB), Distributed SQL(TiDB) and 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 talented Senior Software Engineer who can architect, build and scale Relational and Distributed SQL Databases identifying opportunities to improve how we build, productionize, 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.

Responsibilities

• Build and operate the control plane for large-scale distributed SQL databases such as MySQL and TiDB, automating provisioning, failover, backups and upgrades end to end.
• Design and execute reliability-focused schema and data migrations across multi-tenant database clusters, with zero downtime for the products that depend on them.
• Own the networking stack that connects services to storage on Kubernetes, including connection proxies such as ProxySQL, and tune it for latency, resilience and failover.
• Own and deliver quarterly goals for your team, leading engineers on your team through ambiguity to solve open-ended problems, and ensuring that everyone is supported throughout delivery.
• Support your peers and stakeholders in the product development lifecycle by collaborating with product management, design & analytics by participating in ideation, articulating technical constraints, and partnering on decisions that properly consider risks and trade-offs.
• Proactively identify project, process, technology or business issues, advocate for them, and lead in solving them.
• Support the operations and availability of your team’s artifacts by creating and monitoring metrics, escalating when needed, and supporting “keep the lights on” & on-call efforts.
• Foster a culture of quality and ownership on your team by setting or improving code review and design standards for your team, and advocating for them beyond your team through your writing and tech talks.
• Help develop talent on your team by providing feedback and guidance, and leading by example.

Requirements

• 5+ years of experience as a software engineer.
• Experienced in designing, developing and launching backend systems at scale technologies like Python, Kotlin, AWS, MySQL, Terraform and Kubernetes.
• In-depth, hands-on experience with large-scale database deployments in a production environment.
• Expertise in distributed databases and database technologies such as MySQL (Preferred), TiDB (Preferred), Postgres, Spanner, Vitess, 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 benchmarking, load testing, and capacity planning.
• Familiarity with connection poolers and proxies such as ProxySQL, RDS Proxy, Pg Bouncer, PgDog etc.
• Experience building control-plane or automation tooling for databases, such as provisioning, failover, upgrades or schema migrations, ideally on Kubernetes.
• Experience executing zero-downtime migrations and major version upgrades on production databases, and have built CLI tooling or runbooks to make those procedures repeatable.
• Understanding of Kubernetes networking, service discovery and TLS well enough to debug connection and failover problems between services and databases.
• Experience defining a technical plan for the delivery of a significant feature or system component with an elegant, simple and extensible design. Write high-quality code that is easily understood and used by others.
• Proficient at making significant changes in a large code base, and have developed a suite of tools and practices that enable you and your team to do so safely.
• Experience demonstrating that you take ownership of your growth, proactively seeking feedback from your team, your manager, and your stakeholders.
• Strong verbal and written communication skills that support effective collaboration with our global engineering team.
• Bachelor’s degree in a related field or equivalent practical experience.

We Offer

• Competitive salary range: $195,000 - 255,000 per year (based on location and experience).
• Equity rewards.
• Monthly stipends for health, wellness, and tech spending.
• 100% subsidized medical coverage, dental, and vision for you and your dependents.
• Flexible time off and generous holiday calendars.
• Own a piece of what you build through our employee stock purchase plan (ESPP).

About the Company

Affirm is proud to be a remote-first company. Most roles can be done from almost anywhere within the country of employment. Some positions may occasionally require in-person work at an Affirm office, and a few are office-based due to the nature of the work. All new hires will be invited to attend an in-person onboarding experience.

Our benefits reflect our commitment to care, transparency, and flexibility. Here are a few highlights:

• Health coverage at no cost: We cover 100% of premiums for employees and their dependents.
• Spending stipends: Monthly stipends support your tech setup, and the ability to choose health and wellness options that are right for you.
• Time off to recharge: Flexible time off and generous holiday calendars help you rest when you need to.
• Own a piece of what you build: Our employee stock purchase plan (ESPP) lets you buy Affirm stock at a discount.

We’re committed to providing an inclusive interview process, including accommodations for candidates with disabilities. If you need support, we’re happy to help.

For positions based in San Francisco or Los Angeles: Affirm considers qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records, as required by law.

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