Staff Software Engineer, Backend – Online Storage

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

📋 Description

• Establish the technical strategy for the team over a one-year horizon and align it with projects that impact the business.

• Collaborate closely with product, infrastructure, and site reliability engineering teams.

• Design and create components for a scalable datastore platform.

• Develop control planes to manage and facilitate self-service for hundreds of databases, automating schema and data migrations, disaster recovery, sharding, and performance tuning.

• Work in partnership with product management, design, and analytics throughout the product development lifecycle.

• Define and promote technical solutions and operational practices.

• Manage team operations and ensure availability through monitoring, triage rotations, playbooks, policies, testing, alerting, and on-call responsibilities.

• Establish code review and design standards, advocating for quality through documentation and tech talks.

• Nurture team talent through feedback, mentorship, and leading by example.

⛳️ Requirements

• Over 8 years of experience in designing, developing, and launching backend systems at scale using programming languages such as Python or Kotlin.

• Extensive experience in building highly available distributed systems.

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

• More than 5 years of direct database expertise.

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

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

• Experience in building and managing databases in cloud environments.

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

• Familiarity with connection poolers and proxies such as ProxySQL, RDS Proxy, and PgBouncer.

• Proven experience in delivering significant features or system components, or phasing out existing functionalities, through technical and execution strategies.

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

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

• Excellent verbal and written communication skills.

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

🏝️ Benefits

• Base salary is part of a comprehensive compensation package that may include equity rewards.

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

• 100% subsidized medical coverage, including dental and vision, for you and your dependents.

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

• Flexible Spending Wallets with stipends for Technology, Food, Lifestyle needs, and family planning expenses.

• Competitive vacation and holiday schedules.

• Employee Stock Purchase Plan (ESPP) allowing employees to purchase shares of Affirm at a discounted rate.

• Reasonable accommodations available during the hiring process.