Staff Software Engineer, Online Storage

MySQL
UNITED STATES
October 25, 2026
Full Time
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Job Description

Company: Affirm
Location: Remote (US)
Workplace Type: Remote
Employment Type: Full-time
Pay / Compensation: $204,000 – $290,000 per year (depending on location)

About the Role

At Affirm, the Data and Storage Services team provides a set of managed databases as a platform used to persist data for all Affirm services. The Online Storage team enables self-service access to OLTP storage systems, including Relational DB (MySQL), DynamoDB, Distributed SQL, and Redis. We are looking for a highly skilled and detail-oriented Staff Software Engineer who can drive the technical roadmap for our Databases, identifying opportunities to improve how we build, productize, operate, and scale this mission-critical infrastructure.

What You’ll Do / Key Responsibilities

  • Technical Strategy & Leadership: Set technical strategy for your team on a year-long time scale and lead critical, business-impacting data projects.
  • Datastore Platform Engineering: Design and build components of a scalable datastore platform supporting multi-region, horizontally scalable, globally available, and high-performance solutions.
  • Control Plane & Automation: Develop control planes for the management and self-service of hundreds of databases at scale, automating schema/data migrations, disaster recovery, sharding, and performance tuning.
  • Operations & Availability: Take ownership of your team’s operations and availability by implementing monitoring, triage rotations, playbooks, policies, testing, and alerting for 24/7 reliability.
  • Cross-Functional Collaboration: Collaborate with product management, design, analytics, infrastructure, and SRE to ensure technical sustainability, risk management, and well-understood trade-offs.
  • Engineering Excellence: Foster a culture of quality and ownership by setting code review and design standards, writing technical docs, and delivering tech talks.

Requirements & Qualifications

  • Backend Engineering Experience: 8+ years of experience designing, developing, and launching backend systems at scale using languages like Python or Kotlin.
  • Distributed Systems: Extensive track record of developing highly available distributed systems using technologies like AWS, MySQL, Spark, and Kubernetes.
  • Database Expertise: 5+ years of hands-on database expertise, leveraging deep knowledge of Relational and/or Distributed SQL (such as MySQL, PostgreSQL, TiDB/Vitess) to optimize database performance, ensure data integrity, and implement efficient data access patterns.
  • Database Fundamentals: Deep understanding of database fundamentals including schema design, query optimization, scaling, partitioning, sharding, and performance tuning in multiple functional environments.
  • Cloud & Tooling: Strong background in building and operating databases in cloud environments, database benchmarking, load testing, capacity planning, and familiarity with connection poolers and proxies such as ProxySQL, RDS Proxy, and PgBouncer.
  • Education: Either equivalent practical experience or a Bachelor’s degree in a related field.

Preferred / Bonus Qualifications

  • Experience delivering major features, system components, or deprecating existing functionality through well-defined technical and execution plans.
  • Strong written and verbal communication skills with a proven track record of gathering and iterating on peer feedback.

Benefits & Perks

  • Health coverage at no cost: 100% of premiums covered for employees and dependents (medical, dental, vision).
  • Monthly spending stipends for tech setup, health, and wellness options.
  • Flexible time off and generous holiday calendars.
  • Employee stock purchase plan (ESPP) to buy Affirm stock at a discount.

Affirm is proud to be a remote-first company, allowing most roles to be performed from almost anywhere within the country of employment.

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