Staff Software Engineer, Backend – Online Storage

This is a fully remote position, open to applicants in Canada.

📋 Description

• Establish the team's technical vision over a year-long timeframe and align it with projects that impact the business.

• Work in conjunction with product, infrastructure, and site reliability engineering teams.

• Create and implement scalable datastore platform components designed for multi-region, horizontally scalable, globally accessible, high-performance solutions.

• Develop control planes for the self-service management of numerous databases, automating schema/data migrations, disaster recovery, sharding, and performance tuning.

• Partner with product management, design, and analytics throughout the entire product development lifecycle.

• Define and champion technical solutions and operational processes.

• Oversee team operations and availability, including monitoring, triage rotations, playbooks, policies, testing, alerting, and on-call responsibilities.

• Establish standards for code reviews and design, promoting quality through technical writing and presentations.

• Foster team growth by providing feedback, guidance, and leading by example.

⛳️ Requirements

• A minimum of 8 years of experience in designing, developing, and launching scalable backend systems.

• Proficiency in programming languages such as Python or Kotlin.

• Extensive experience in developing highly available distributed systems.

• Familiarity with AWS, MySQL, Spark, and Kubernetes.

• Over 5 years of hands-on experience with databases.

• In-depth knowledge of relational and/or distributed SQL databases, including MySQL, PostgreSQL, TiDB, or Vitess.

• Understanding of schema design, query optimization, scaling, partitioning, sharding, and performance tuning.

• Strong experience in building and managing databases within cloud environments.

• Expertise in database benchmarking, load testing, and capacity planning.

• Knowledge of connection poolers and proxies such as ProxySQL, RDS Proxy, and PgBouncer.

• Experience in delivering significant features or system components, or phasing out existing functionalities through technical and execution plans.

• Capability to write high-quality, clear, and reusable code.

• Ability to navigate ambiguity from low-level language idioms to large-system architecture.

• Proven growth and impact through collecting and implementing peer feedback.

• Excellent verbal and written communication skills for collaborating with a global engineering team.

• Equivalent practical experience or a Bachelor’s degree in a related field.

🏝️ Benefits

• Monthly stipends for health, wellness, and technology-related expenses.

• Comprehensive medical coverage, including dental and vision, fully subsidized for you and your dependents.

• Health care coverage with all premiums paid for you and your dependents.

• Flexible Spending Wallets, offering stipends for technology, food, lifestyle needs, and family formation costs.

• Competitive vacation and holiday schedules.

• Employee stock purchase plan allowing employees to acquire shares of Affirm at a discounted rate.

• Reasonable accommodations provided during the hiring process.