Staff Software Engineer, Backend (Online Storage)

The Data and Storage Services team at Affirm is responsible for data infrastructure across OLTP and OLAP systems, including online checkout databases, batch orchestration, streaming infrastructure, event-driven frameworks, BI, analytics tooling, and large-scale data platforms. The Online Storage team provides managed databases as a platform, enabling self-service access to OLTP storage systems including MySQL, DynamoDB, Distributed SQL, and Redis. As a Staff Software Engineer, you will drive the technical roadmap for databases (Relational and KeyValue), set technical strategy on a year-long time scale, and collaborate with product, infrastructure, and SRE teams.

• Design and build components of a scalable datastore platform, contributing to multi-region, horizontally scalable, globally available, and high-performance datastore solutions.
• Develop control planes for management and self-service of hundreds of databases, automating schema/data migrations, disaster recovery, sharding, and performance tuning.
• Collaborate across teams in the product development lifecycle, focusing on database solutions, ensuring technical sustainability, risks, and trade-offs are well understood.
• Act as a force-multiplier by defining and advocating technical solutions and operational processes.
• Take ownership of team operations and availability, ensuring monitoring, triage rotations, playbooks, policies, testing, and alerting are in place.
• Foster a culture of quality and ownership by setting code review and design standards, and advocating through writing and tech talks.
• Help develop talent by providing feedback and guidance.

• 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 with relational and/or distributed SQL such as MySQL, PostgreSQL, TiDB/Vitess.
• Deep understanding of database fundamentals including schema design, query optimization, scaling, partitioning, sharding, and performance tuning.
• Strong background 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.
• Experience delivering major features or system components through technical and execution plans.
• Strong verbal and written communication skills for global collaboration.
• Equivalent practical experience or a Bachelor’s degree in a related field.

Base pay is part of a total compensation package that may include equity rewards, monthly stipends for health, wellness, and tech spending, and benefits including 100% subsidized medical coverage, dental, and vision for you and your dependents.

USA base pay range (CA, WA, NY, NJ, CT) per year: $230,000 - $290,000

USA base pay range (all other U.S. states) per year: $204,000 - $264,000

Benefits include health coverage at no cost, spending stipends, flexible time off, generous holiday calendars, and an employee stock purchase plan (ESPP).

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