[Hiring] Staff Software Engineer, Backend (Online Storage) @Affirm

Role Description

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

• Set technical strategy for your team on a year-long time scale, and help tie it together with 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, contributing to Affirm's goals.
• Develop control planes for management, 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.
• Act as a force-multiplier for your team through your definition and advocacy of technical solutions and operational processes.
• Take ownership of your team’s operations and availability by ensuring proper monitoring, triage rotations, playbooks, policies, testing, and alerting are in place.
• Foster a culture of quality and ownership on your team by setting code review and design standards.
• Help develop talent on your team by providing feedback and guidance, and leading by example.

Qualifications

• 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.
• Strong background and expertise in building and operating databases in cloud environments.
• Experience delivering major features, system components or deprecating existing functionality in a system.
• 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.

Requirements

• Deep understanding of Database fundamentals including schema design, query optimization, scaling, partitioning, sharding, and performance tuning in multiple functional environments.
• Expertise in database benchmarking, load testing, and capacity planning.
• Familiarity with connection poolers and proxies such as ProxySQL, RDS Proxy, Pg Bouncer, etc.
• Thrives in ambiguity, comfortable moving from low-level language idioms to the architecture of large systems.
• Growth and impact trajectory demonstrates mastery in gathering and iterating on feedback from engineering and cross-functional peers.

Benefits

• Health care coverage - Affirm covers all premiums for all levels of coverage for you and your dependents.
• Flexible Spending Wallets - generous stipends for spending on Technology, Food, various Lifestyle needs, and family forming expenses.
• Time off - competitive vacation and holiday schedules allowing you to take time off to rest and recharge.
• ESPP - An employee stock purchase plan enabling you to buy shares of Affirm at a discount.