Staff Backend Software Engineer (Online Storage)

• 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
• 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 Affirm’s 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

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- You have an extensive track record of developing highly available distributed systems using technologies like AWS, MySQL, Spark and Kubernetes
• 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
• You have 8+ years of experience designing, developing and launching backend systems at scale using languages like Python or Kotlin
• Your growth and impact trajectory demonstrates that you have mastered gathering and iterating on feedback from your engineering and cross-functional peers
• Strong background and expertise in building and operating databases in cloud environments
• This position requires either equivalent practical experience or a Bachelor’s degree in a related field
• Should possess deep understanding of Database fundamentals including schema design, query optimization, scaling, partitioning, sharding and performance tuning in multiple functional environments
• You have strong verbal and written communication skills that support effective collaboration with our global engineering team
• 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 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