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Staff Software Engineer, Backend (Online Storage)

Affirm· Infrastructure Platform Eng
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Remote$230k - $290kfull-timePosted 2mo ago

About the role

Staff Software Engineer responsible for setting technical strategy and building a scalable datastore platform for Affirm's managed databases (Relational and KeyValue). Focus on multi-region, horizontally scalable, high-performance datastore solutions, self-service database access, and platform reliability.

Responsibilities

  • Setting technical strategy for the team on a year-long time scale and aligning with critical, business-impacting projects
  • Collaborating with product, infrastructure, and SRE teams
  • Designing and building components of a scalable datastore platform with multi-region, horizontally scalable, globally available, high-performance characteristics
  • Developing control planes for management and self-service of hundreds of databases, including schema/data migrations, disaster recovery, sharding, and performance tuning
  • Collaborating across teams in the product lifecycle to ensure technical sustainability, risks, and trade-offs are understood
  • Advocating for technical solutions and operational processes to act as a force-multiplier for the team
  • Owning team operations and availability through monitoring, on-call readiness, playbooks, policies, testing, and alerting
  • Setting code review and design standards and promoting them through writing and tech talks
  • Helping develop talent by providing feedback, guidance, and leading by example

Qualifications

  • 8+ years of experience designing, developing and launching backend systems at scale using Python or Kotlin
  • Extensive track record of developing highly available distributed systems using AWS, MySQL, Spark and Kubernetes
  • 5+ years of hands-on Database Expertise with Relational and/or Distributed SQL (e.g., MySQL, PostgreSQL, TiDB/Vitess) including schema design, query optimization, scaling, partitioning, sharding and performance tuning
  • Strong background and expertise in building and operating databases in cloud environments; database benchmarking, load testing, and capacity planning
  • Familiarity with connection poolers/proxies (e.g., ProxySQL, RDS Proxy, Pg Bouncer)
  • Experience delivering major features, system components or deprecating functionality with clear technical and execution plans
  • Ability to thrive in ambiguity and understand both low-level language idioms and large system architecture
  • Proven growth trajectory through gathering and iterating feedback from engineering and cross-functional peers
  • Strong verbal and written communication skills for collaboration with a global engineering team
  • Equivalent practical experience or Bachelor’s degree in a related field

Skills

Required:Backend design and developmentDistributed systemsDatabase engineering (Relational/Distributed SQL)

Benefits

  • 100% subsidized medical coverage for employees and dependents
  • Monthly stipends for tech setup and health/wellness options
  • Flexible time off and generous holiday calendar
  • Employee stock purchase plan (ESPP) with stock at a discount
Last updated Sep 16, 2026. Interested? Apply on the company site.

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