Staff Software Engineer, Backend (Online Storage)

Affirm is reinventing credit to make it more honest and friendly, giving consumers the flexibility to buy now and pay later without any hidden fees or compounding interest. We help people pay over time for almost anything—with no late fees or surprises. Through advanced technology and analytics that look beyond FICO, we’re able to serve a much broader population than other lenders.

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. 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).

• Set technical strategy for your team on a year-long time scale and tie it together with critical, business-impacting projects.
• Work closely with product, infrastructure, and site reliability engineering (SRE) teams.
• Design and build components of a scalable datastore platform, leveraging experience in multi-region, horizontally scalable, globally available, and high-performance datastore solutions.
• Develop control planes for management and self-service of hundreds of databases at scale, 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 and managed.
• Act as a force-multiplier through definition and advocacy of technical solutions and operational processes.
• Take ownership of team operations and availability by ensuring monitoring, triage rotations, playbooks, policies, testing, and alerting are in place to support “keep the lights on” and on-call efforts.
• Foster a culture of quality and ownership by setting code review and design standards, advocating beyond the team through writing and tech talks.
• Help develop talent by providing feedback and guidance, and leading by example.

• 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, leveraging deep knowledge of Relational and/or Distributed SQL such as MySQL, PostgreSQL, TiDB/Vitess to optimize database performance, ensure data integrity, and implement efficient data access patterns.
• Deep understanding of database fundamentals including schema design, query optimization, scaling, partitioning, sharding, and performance tuning in multiple functional environments.
• Strong background and expertise 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, etc.
• Experience delivering major features, system components, or deprecating existing functionality through a technical and execution plan.
• Write high quality code that is easily understood and used by others.
• Thrive in ambiguity, comfortable moving from low-level language idioms to architecture of large systems.
• Mastered gathering and iterating on feedback from engineering and cross-functional peers.
• Strong verbal and written communication skills supporting effective collaboration with a global engineering team.
• 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 care coverage (Affirm covers all premiums for all levels of coverage for you and your dependents), Flexible Spending Wallets (generous stipends for Technology, Food, various Lifestyle needs, and family forming expenses), time off (competitive vacation and holiday schedules), and ESPP (employee stock purchase plan enabling you to buy shares of Affirm at a discount).

Affirm is proud to be a remote-first company. The majority of our roles are remote and you can work almost anywhere within the country of employment. Affirmers in proximal roles have the flexibility to work remotely, but will occasionally be required to work out of their assigned Affirm office. A limited number of roles remain office-based due to the nature of their job responsibilities.

Affirm is committed to providing an inclusive interview experience, including reasonable accommodations for people with disabilities. Pursuant to the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance and Los Angeles Fair Chance Initiative for Hiring Ordinance, Affirm will consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records.