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Salary: USD 173,000 - 255,000 / annual
Affirm's Data and Storage Services team is seeking a Senior Software Engineer to architect, build, and scale the Online Storage platform—a managed database service that provides self-service access to OLTP storage systems including MySQL, DynamoDB, TiDB, and Redis. This platform persists data for all Affirm services, including mission-critical financial transactional data, data science models, and new persistence use cases.
In this role, you will:
- Build and operate the control plane for large-scale distributed SQL databases (MySQL, TiDB), automating provisioning, failover, backups, and upgrades end-to-end.
- Design and execute reliability-focused schema and data migrations across multi-tenant database clusters with zero downtime.
- Own the networking stack connecting services to storage on Kubernetes, including connection proxies like ProxySQL, tuned for latency, resilience, and failover.
- Own and deliver quarterly goals for your team, leading engineers through ambiguity to solve open-ended problems.
- Support peers and stakeholders in the product development lifecycle by collaborating with product management, design, and analytics.
- Proactively identify and advocate for project, process, technology, or business issues, leading in solving them.
- Support operations and availability by creating and monitoring metrics, escalating when needed, and participating in on-call efforts.
- Foster a culture of quality and ownership by setting or improving code review and design standards.
- Develop talent on your team through feedback, guidance, and leading by example.
You'll work on infrastructure that powers Affirm's financial products, directly influencing your team's roadmap and learning from experienced engineers in a mission-driven environment.
REQUIREMENTS:
- 5+ years of experience as a software engineer.
- Experience designing, developing, and launching backend systems at scale using Python, Kotlin, AWS, MySQL, Terraform, and Kubernetes.
- In-depth, hands-on experience with large-scale database deployments in production environments.
- Expertise in distributed databases and database technologies such as MySQL (preferred), TiDB (preferred), Postgres, Spanner, Vitess, or CockroachDB.
- Solid understanding of distributed database architecture, data modeling, and performance tuning, particularly SQL tuning and optimization techniques.
- Expertise in database benchmarking, load testing, and capacity planning.
- Familiarity with connection poolers and proxies such as ProxySQL, RDS Proxy, Pg Bouncer, or PgDog.
- Experience building control-plane or automation tooling for databases (provisioning, failover, upgrades, schema migrations), ideally on Kubernetes.
- Demonstrated execution of zero-downtime migrations and major version upgrades on production databases; experience building CLI tooling or runbooks for repeatable procedures.
- Understanding of Kubernetes networking, service discovery, and TLS sufficient to debug connection and failover problems.
- Experience defining technical plans for significant features or system components with elegant, simple, and extensible design.
- High-quality code writing that is easily understood and used by others.
- Proficiency making significant changes in large codebases with developed tools and practices enabling safe execution.
- Demonstrated ownership of growth, proactively seeking feedback from team, manager, and stakeholders.
- Strong verbal and written communication skills supporting effective collaboration with global engineering teams.
- Bachelor's degree in a related field or equivalent practical experience.
