Staff Software Engineer, Backend (Online Storage)

About the Position

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.

Responsibilities

• 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.
• Work closely with and contribute to other teams - including product, infrastructure, and site reliability engineering (SRE).
• 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.
• Develop control planes for management, self-service of hundreds of databases at scale automating schema/data migrations, disaster recovery, sharding, and performance tuning.
• 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.
• Act as a force-multiplier for your team through your definition and advocacy of technical solutions and operational processes.
• 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.
• 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.
• Help develop talent on your team by providing feedback and guidance, and leading by example.

Requirements

• 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 technologies like AWS, MySQL, Spark, and Kubernetes.
• 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 a 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.
• Experience delivering major features, system components, or deprecating existing functionality in a system through the definition of a technical and execution plan. Write high-quality code that is easily understood and used by others.
• 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.
• Demonstrate a growth and impact trajectory that shows you have mastered gathering and iterating on feedback from your engineering and cross-functional peers.
• Strong verbal and written communication skills that support effective collaboration with our global engineering team.
• Either equivalent practical experience or a Bachelor’s degree in a related field.

We Offer

• Base Pay: $204,000 - $290,000 per year (depending on location)
• Equity Rewards
• 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

About the Company

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.

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.

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