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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 databases as a platform for all Affirm services. This team is responsible for OLTP and OLAP infrastructure spanning relational databases (MySQL), DynamoDB, distributed SQL, Redis caching, and related data systems that handle mission-critical financial transactional data.
In this role, you will set the technical roadmap for database systems (relational and key-value stores) on a year-long timescale, identifying opportunities to improve how the team builds, productizes, and operates this infrastructure. You'll design and build components of a scalable datastore platform, 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 and 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. You take ownership of team operations and availability by establishing monitoring, triage rotations, playbooks, policies, testing, and alerting. You'll 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 and mentorship.
Required qualifications: 8+ years designing, developing, and launching backend systems at scale using Python or Kotlin; extensive track record with highly available distributed systems using AWS, MySQL, Spark, and Kubernetes; 5+ years of hands-on database expertise with relational and/or distributed SQL (MySQL, PostgreSQL, TiDB, Vitess); deep understanding of schema design, query optimization, scaling, partitioning, sharding, and performance tuning; experience 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). You should have a track record of delivering major features and system components, write high-quality code, thrive in ambiguity, and be comfortable moving from low-level language idioms to large-system architecture.
