Staff Software Engineer, Backend (Online Storage)

TL;DR

Staff Software Engineer, Backend (Online Storage) (Python/Kotlin, Databases): Building and operating scalable online storage platforms for mission-critical financial data with an accent on distributed databases, reliability, and self-service infrastructure. Focus on designing multi-region datastore systems, automating migrations and disaster recovery, and solving complex scaling, sharding, and performance challenges.

Location: Remote within the United States

Salary: $204,000–$264,000 per year in other U.S. states; $230,000–$290,000 per year in California, Washington, New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut.

Company

Affirm is a fintech company developing transparent buy-now-pay-later products without hidden fees or compounding interest.

What you will do

• Set the technical strategy and roadmap for the Online Storage team over a year-long horizon.
• Design and build scalable datastore platform components using relational and key-value database technologies.
• Develop control planes for self-service database management, schema and data migrations, disaster recovery, sharding, and performance tuning.
• Collaborate with product, infrastructure, SRE, design, and analytics teams on sustainable database solutions and technical trade-offs.
• Own operational reliability through monitoring, alerting, testing, playbooks, availability practices, and on-call support.
• Raise engineering quality through design and code review standards, technical writing, talks, mentoring, and feedback.

Requirements

• 8+ years of experience designing, developing, and launching large-scale backend systems using Python or Kotlin.
• 5+ years of hands-on database experience with relational or distributed SQL systems, including schema design, query optimization, scaling, partitioning, sharding, and performance tuning.
• Experience building and operating highly available distributed systems with AWS, MySQL, Spark, and Kubernetes.
• Expertise in database benchmarking, load testing, capacity planning, cloud database operations, and connection poolers or proxies such as ProxySQL, RDS Proxy, or PgBouncer.
• Experience defining technical and execution plans, delivering major system features, writing maintainable code, and working across system architecture levels.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills, plus equivalent practical experience or a bachelor’s degree in a related field.

Culture & Benefits

• Remote-first work model for roles within the country of employment.
• 100% subsidized medical coverage, including coverage for dependents, plus dental and vision benefits.
• Flexible spending stipends for technology, food, lifestyle, and family-forming expenses.
• Competitive vacation and holiday schedules.
• Employee stock purchase plan with discounted shares.

Hiring process

• Inclusive interview experience with reasonable accommodations available for candidates with disabilities.