Staff Software Engineer

About the Role

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.

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.

What You'll Do

• Set technical strategy for your team on a year-long time scale, connecting it to critical, business-impacting projects.
• Work closely with and contribute to other teams including product, infrastructure, and site reliability engineering (SRE).
• Design and build components of a scalable datastore platform, leveraging experience in creating 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.
• Act as a force-multiplier for your team through definition and advocacy of technical solutions and operational processes.
• Take ownership of your team’s operations and availability by ensuring appropriate 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.
• Help develop talent on your team by providing feedback and guidance, and leading by example.

What We Look For

• 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, or TiDB/Vitess to optimize database performance, ensuring data integrity, and implementing 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 in building and operating databases in cloud environments, 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 technical and execution plans.
• Ability to thrive in ambiguity and move comfortably between low-level language idioms and large-scale system architectures.
• Proven track record of gathering and iterating on peer and cross-functional feedback.
• Strong verbal and written communication skills.
• Either equivalent practical experience or a Bachelor’s degree in a related field.