Staff Software Engineer

Summary

Join Affirm's Online Storage team and help scale our products to 10x and beyond by building world-class systems. As a member of this team, you will collaborate with other teams to shape the technical direction and roadmap for improving our database architecture, focusing on scalability, reliability, performance, and cost efficiency. You will design, build, and maintain highly durable and strongly consistent database-as-a-service architecture, work closely with product teams to understand business requirements, and develop and enforce best practices in database design and management. You will also participate in an on-call rotation and mentor engineers. This role offers the opportunity to learn bleeding-edge open-source technologies and contribute to the future of Affirm's Online Storage platform. Affirm is a fast-growing company that prioritizes building its own technology and investing in engineering talent. We are a remote-first company offering competitive benefits.

Requirements

• Bachelors or Masters degree in Computer Science with 7+ years of experience as a software engineer with leadership exposure and experience mentoring junior engineers
• In-depth, hands-on experience with large-scale database deployments in a production environment
• Expertise in distributed databases and database technologies such as MySQL InnoDB storage (Preferred), Postgres, Spanner, Vitess, TiDB, CockroachDB etc
• Solid understanding of distributed database architecture, data modeling, and performance tuning. Particularly, expertise in SQL tuning and performance optimization techniques
• Expertise in Database/Table and backup-recovery management
• Expertise in SQL tuning and performance optimization techniques
• Expertise in database benchmarking, load testings, and capacity planning
• Familiarity with connection poolers and proxies such as ProxySQL, RDS Proxy, Pg Bouncer, etc
• Proficiency in Python or Kotlin or both
• Experience with AWS and Kubernetes
• Experience building software with IaC (terraform or crossplane) frameworks and tools
• Exceptional communication skills with the ability to engage effectively with both technical and non-technical stakeholders
• Expertise to create and triage database alerts and issues, identify root causes, and implement corrective solutions
• This position requires either equivalent practical experience or a Bachelor’s degree in a related field

Responsibilities

• Shape the technical direction, strategy and roadmap towards improving our database architecture, focusing on scalability, reliability, performance, and cost efficiency
• Working with engineers managing Affirm’s distributed database technologies, particularly AWS Aurora MySQL, Distributed SQL, and eventually expanding to DynamoDB and Caching
• Design, build and highly durable and strongly consistent database as service architecture
• Design and build solutions at scale for challenges such as multi-region, active resharding and globally available services
• Work closely with product teams to understand business requirements and translate them into robust database solutions
• Assist partners achieve better query performance by suggesting better query optimizations and effective schemas
• Develop and enforce best practices in database design and management, ensuring data integrity, security, and optimal performance
• Stay abreast of industry trends and emerging technologies in transactional databases to continually enhance our systems and processes
• Participating in an on-call rotation and collaborating with other teams, such as SRE, to solve production issues
• Leading and mentoring engineers to define and execute on roadmap aligned with stakeholder needs

Benefits

• Health care coverage - Affirm covers all premiums for all levels of coverage for you and your dependents
• Flexible Spending Wallets - generous stipends for spending on Technology, Food, various Lifestyle needs, and family forming expenses
• Time off - competitive vacation and holiday schedules allowing you to take time off to rest and recharge
• ESPP - An employee stock purchase plan enabling you to buy shares of Affirm at a discount