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Define and drive the year‑long technical roadmap for the Online Storage platform, design and build scalable multi‑region datastore components, and create control‑plane tooling for self‑service database management, migrations, and performance tuning. Own the operational health of the platform through monitoring, on‑call rotations, playbooks, and code‑review standards.
8+ years of backend engineering experience with Python or Kotlin, plus 5+ years of deep hands‑on expertise in relational and/or distributed SQL databases (MySQL, PostgreSQL, TiDB/Vitess) and cloud infrastructure (AWS, Kubernetes). Proven track record building highly available distributed systems and strong communication skills.
The role underpins Affirm’s core financial services by providing reliable, cost‑efficient, and self‑service data storage for all services, ensuring mission‑critical transactional data is secure, performant, and available at massive scale.
A senior engineer who thrives in ambiguous, high‑impact environments, enjoys shaping strategy, mentoring teams, and has deep database knowledge combined with strong leadership and cross‑functional collaboration abilities.
At Affirm, we exist for the moments that matter—giving people a clear, predictable way to pay over time, with no hidden fees, no surprises, and no tradeoffs on what matters most.
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.
What You'll Do
As an integral member of the Online Storage team,
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.
What We Look For
You have 8+ years of experience designing, developing and launching backend systems at scale using languages like Python or Kotlin.
You have an extensive track record of developing highly available distributed systems using technologies like AWS, MySQL, Spark and Kubernetes.
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. Should possess 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.
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.
Your growth and impact trajectory demonstrates that you have mastered gathering and iterating on feedback from your engineering and cross-functional peers.
You have strong verbal and written communication skills that support effective collaboration with our global engineering team.
This position requires either equivalent practical experience or a Bachelor’s degree in a related field.
Pay Grade - P
Equity Grade - 7
Employees new to Affirm typically come in at the start of the pay range. Affirm focuses on providing a simple and transparent pay structure which is based on a variety of factors, including location, experience and job-related skills.
Base pay is part of a total compensation package that may include monthly stipends for health, wellness and tech spending, and benefits (including 100% subsidized medical coverage, dental and vision for you and your dependents). In addition, the employees may be eligible for equity rewards offered by Affirm Holdings, Inc. (parent company).
CAN base pay range per year: $181,000 - 241,000 CAD
This posting is for an existing vacancy.
#LI Remote
This remote role is open only to candidates residing in Alberta, British Columbia, Manitoba, New Brunswick, Newfoundland and Labrador, Nova Scotia, Ontario, Prince Edward Island, or Saskatchewan.
Remote-first with flexibility built in
Affirm is proud to be a remote-first company. Most roles can be done from almost anywhere within the country of employment. Some positions may occasionally require in-person work at an Affirm office, and a few are office-based due to the nature of the work. All new hires will be invited to attend an in-person onboarding experience.
Benefits designed for you
Our benefits reflect our commitment to care, transparency, and flexibility. Here are a few highlights:
We’re committed to providing an inclusive interview process, including accommodations for candidates with disabilities. If you need support, we’re happy to help.
For positions based in San Francisco or Los Angeles: Affirm considers qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records, as required by law.
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