Staff 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), 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

• Set 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. You 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.
• Your growth and impact trajectory demonstrates that 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.
• This position requires either equivalent practical experience or a Bachelor’s degree in a related field.

We Offer

• Competitive base pay range: $204,000 - $290,000 per year (depending on location).
• 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.
• Employee stock purchase plan (ESPP) to buy Affirm stock at a discount.

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. 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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