Backend Software Engineer (Online Storage)

• 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 Software Engineer who can build and scale Cache Services (Redis and Valkey) identifying opportunities to improve how we migrate, productionize, operate, self-service 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
• Build and scale Affirm’s Cache Services on Redis and Valkey, owning cluster migrations end to end and delivering them in phases against agreed outcomes
• Productionize cache clusters: capacity and shard planning, failover and replication setup, upgrades, and staged rollouts with rollback paths
• Replace manual cache requests (provisioning, config changes, access) with automated, audited self-service workflows
• Operate the fleet in production: define SLOs, build alerting for hot keys, memory pressure and replication lag, and use on-call findings to reduce KTLO
• Partner with client teams on caching strategy (key design, TTLs, consistency, client timeouts) and feed fleet data into the team’s roadmap
• With the support of your team’s tech lead and manager, you will break down larger projects into individual tasks, deliver them in multiple phases, and collaborate with others to ensure timely delivery of your work
• 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
• 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
• Contribute to a sense of community on your team by engaging in growth and development activities such as participation in the interview process

Benefits

• Compensation: We have a simple, flexible, and transparent remote-first compensation structure so you can make the best decisions for yourself and your family
• Spending Wallets: Access tech, food, lifestyle, and family planning wallets for your expenses
• Supportive Communities: Get involved with our employee resource groups and community groups
• Remote-first Workforce: If your role is remote, you can set up shop anywhere in your home country
• Generous Time Off: Take the time you need when life happens
• Health Benefits: Get a plan that fits your needs
• Mental Healthcare: Take care of your mind with great mental health programs
• Parental Leave: Birth and non-birth parents get 18 weeks’ paid leave. Plus, a 4-week return-to-work transition program, at full base pay
• Away Days: We offer 20 company-wide paid days off—which help our teams collectively pause to recharge
• Learning & Development: Engage in exciting learning programs to level up your growth- Experience automating infrastructure operations with Terraform, Kubernetes and Python, and prefer tested playbooks over manual runbooks
• Have worked on Redis, Valkey or a comparable in-memory store in production and understand replication, persistence, cluster mode, eviction, and their failure modes
• 2+ years of experience as a software engineer
• Strong verbal and written communication skills that support effective collaboration with our global engineering team
• Familiar with the building blocks of distributed systems, and the technologies like AWS, MySQL, Redis/Valkey, Terraform and Kubernetes
• You have mastered taking a simple problem or business scenario into a solution that interacts with multiple software components, and executing on it by writing clear, easily understood, well tested and extensible code
• Experience designing, developing and launching backend systems and are proficient in one of Python or Kotlin
• Comfortable navigating a large code base, debugging others’ code, and providing feedback to other engineers through code reviews
• Experience carrying on-call for a stateful service and can take an incident from metrics to root cause to a durable fix
• Can reason about a caching workload end to end: hit rates, tail latency, hot keys, stampedes, and consistency with the source of truth
• Demonstrated experience that you take ownership of your growth, proactively seeking feedback from your team, your manager, and your stakeholders