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Staff Software Engineer, Backend (Online Storage)

Affirm· Infrastructure Platform Eng
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Hybrid (Canada)CA$181k - CA$241kfull-timePosted 2mo ago

About the role

Staff Software Engineer to drive technical roadmap for the Databases (Relational and KeyValue) within Affirm's Online Storage platform, building scalable, multi-region datastore solutions and leading operations, design standards, and talent development.

Responsibilities

  • Setting technical strategy for the team on a year-long time scale and aligning it 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 datastore solutions
  • Developing control planes for management and self-service of hundreds of databases at scale, automating schema/data migrations, disaster recovery, sharding, and performance tuning
  • Collaborating across teams in the product development lifecycle to ensure technical sustainability, risks, and trade-offs are understood
  • Acting as a force-multiplier by defining and advocating technical solutions and operational processes
  • Owning team operations and availability with monitoring, triage rotations, playbooks, policies, testing, and alerting
  • Fostering a culture of quality and ownership by setting code review and design standards and promoting them beyond the team
  • Helping develop talent on the team through feedback, guidance, and leading by example

Qualifications

  • 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 AWS, MySQL, Spark and Kubernetes
  • 5+ years of hands-on database expertise with Relational and/or Distributed SQL such as MySQL, PostgreSQL, TiDB/Vitess
  • Deep knowledge of database fundamentals including schema design, query optimization, scaling, partitioning, sharding and performance tuning in multiple environments
  • Strong background and expertise in building and operating databases in cloud environments
  • Experience with database benchmarking, load testing, and capacity planning
  • Familiarity with connection poolers and proxies (e.g., ProxySQL, RDS Proxy, PgBouncer)
  • Experience delivering major features or system components with clear technical and execution plans
  • Ability to thrive in ambiguity and understand large system architectures
  • Proven ability to gather and iterate on feedback from engineering and cross-functional peers
  • Strong verbal and written communication skills for collaboration with global teams
  • Equivalent practical experience or Bachelor’s degree in a related field

Skills

Required:Backend software engineeringDistributed systemsDatabase design and optimizationCloud infrastructureLeadership and mentorship

Benefits

  • Health coverage at no cost for employees and dependents
  • Monthly stipends for tech setup and health/wellness options
  • Flexible time off and generous holidays
  • Employee stock purchase plan (ESPP)
  • Remote-first with flexibility, onboarding in-person option
  • Mutual accommodation support in interview process
Last updated Sep 16, 2026. Interested? Apply on the company site.

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