Staff Software Engineer, Backend (Online Storage)

Company and Team

Role Overview

Responsibilities

• Set technical strategy over a year-long horizon and connect it to critical business projects.
• Design and build multi-region, horizontally scalable, globally available datastore components.
• Develop database control planes and automate migrations, disaster recovery, sharding, and performance tuning.
• Collaborate with product, infrastructure, SRE, design, and analytics teams on sustainable database solutions.
• Own monitoring, triage, playbooks, policies, testing, alerting, availability, and on-call operations.
• Set quality standards through code reviews, design reviews, writing, and technical talks.
• Provide feedback and guidance to develop team talent.

Qualifications

• 8 or more years of experience designing, developing, and launching backend systems at scale.
• 5 or more years of hands-on database expertise with relational or distributed SQL systems.
• Experience with highly available distributed systems and technologies such as AWS, MySQL, Spark, and Kubernetes.
• Deep knowledge of schema design, query optimization, scaling, partitioning, sharding, performance tuning, benchmarking, load testing, and capacity planning.
• Experience delivering major system features through technical and execution planning.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills for global engineering collaboration.
• Equivalent practical experience or a bachelor's degree in a related field.

Technical Environment

• Backend languages include Python or Kotlin.
• Database technologies include MySQL, PostgreSQL, TiDB, Vitess, ProxySQL, RDS Proxy, and PgBouncer.
• The platform supports relational databases, distributed SQL, DynamoDB, Redis, cloud environments, and Kubernetes.

Compensation

• Annual base pay is $230,000 to $290,000 in California, Washington, New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut.
• Annual base pay is $204,000 to $264,000 in other U.S. states.
• Total compensation may include equity, monthly health and wellness stipends, technology spending, and benefits.

Workplace

• Affirm describes itself as a remote-first company, with most roles remote and work generally available within the country of employment.
• Some proximal roles may require occasional work from an assigned office, while a limited number of roles are office-based.

Benefits

• Benefits include fully subsidized medical coverage, dental and vision coverage, flexible spending wallets, paid time off, holidays, and an employee stock purchase plan.