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Affirm is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to lead the technical strategy and execution of the Online Storage team, which provides managed database platforms (MySQL, DynamoDB, Distributed SQL, Redis) serving all Affirm services, including mission-critical financial transactional data.
In this role, you will set the technical roadmap for relational and key-value database systems on a year-long horizon, directly influencing how the team builds, productizes, and operates this infrastructure. You'll design and build scalable datastore platform components, including multi-region, horizontally scalable, globally available, and high-performance solutions. Key responsibilities include developing control planes for managing hundreds of databases at scale—automating schema/data migrations, disaster recovery, sharding, and performance tuning.
You will collaborate across product, infrastructure, and SRE teams to ensure technical sustainability and manage risks and trade-offs. You'll act as a force-multiplier by defining and advocating for technical solutions and operational processes. Ownership of team operations and availability is critical: you'll establish monitoring, triage rotations, playbooks, policies, testing, and alerting to support on-call efforts.
You will foster a culture of quality and ownership by setting code review and design standards, advocating for them through writing and tech talks, and developing talent on your team through feedback, guidance, and leading by example.
Required qualifications: 8+ years designing, developing, and launching backend systems at scale using Python or Kotlin; extensive track record with highly available distributed systems (AWS, MySQL, Spark, Kubernetes); 5+ years hands-on database expertise with relational and/or distributed SQL (MySQL, PostgreSQL, TiDB, Vitess); deep knowledge of schema design, query optimization, scaling, partitioning, sharding, and performance tuning; strong background building and operating databases in cloud environments; expertise in database benchmarking, load testing, and capacity planning; familiarity with connection poolers and proxies (ProxySQL, RDS Proxy, PgBouncer); proven ability to deliver major features and system components through technical and execution planning; high-quality code that is easily understood and used by others; comfort thriving in ambiguity and moving from low-level language idioms to large-system architecture.
