Senior Staff Software Engineer, Backend (Online Storage)

Affirm’s engineering team is building a large-scale, fault-tolerant, and global infrastructure that is shared across multiple financial products. Ensuring that our infrastructure is accessible to all engineers is critical to the success of the business. We pride ourselves on our culture across engineering of engaging in thorough technical design review, operational excellence, and capable incident response and analysis.

The Online Storage team provides a set of managed databases as a platform, used to persist data for all Affirm services. Our platform enables self-service access to OLTP storage systems, including  AWS Aurora (MySQL), DynamoDB, Distributed SQL, Caching. As a team, we are responsible for various data and access patterns, including but not limited to mission-critical financial transactional data, data science models, and any new persistence use case. These responsibilities require us to learn and gain deep expertise in various database systems. 

What you’ll do

As a member of the Online Storage infrastructure team, you will collaborate with other teams - including product, infrastructure, and site reliability engineering (SRE) to:

• Help design and build a scalable datastore platform, aligning strategies with Affirm's goals, and leveraging experience in creating multi-region, horizontally scalable, globally available, and high-performance datastore solutions. 
• Collaborate with other teams on their database needs and provide continuous guidance on design and architecture.
• Participate in an on-call rotation and collaborate with other teams such as SRE to solve production issues.
• Upgrade, cost optimize, and maintain our fleet of databases.
• Lead and develop technical strategies to build and maintain self-service database platforms aligned withAffirms long-term architectural vision.
• Establish the best practices in development of database solutions and management to provide critical support for operating systems at scale. These include schema/data migrations, disaster recovery, observability, sharding and performance tuning.
• Ensure adoption of the best practices to improve production health.
• Stay ahead of industry trends in storage technologies and solutions and identify opportunities to innovate and improve our storage offerings.
• Mentor engineers providing guidance on new storage technologies, development, operations and foster a culture of innovation and technical excellence.

What we look for 

Key Responsibilities:

• Architect and Implement: Design, develop, and maintain core components of OnStor's cloud-based data management platform, with a focus on scalability, performance, and reliability.
• Database Expertise: Leverage your deep knowledge of MySQL and Distributed SQL to optimize database performance, ensure data integrity, and implement efficient data access patterns. Should possess deep understanding of Database fundamentals including scaling, partitioning, sharding and performance tuning in multiple functional environments. Strong background and expertise in building and operating databases in cloud environments. Expertise in database benchmarking, load testing, and capacity planning. Familiarity with connection poolers and proxies such as ProxySQL, RDS Proxy Pg Bouncer, etc.
• Distributed Systems: Tackle the challenges of large-scale distributed systems, including data partitioning, replication, and consistency models.
• Collaboration: Work closely with product managers to translate business requirements into technical solutions, and with fellow engineers to deliver high-quality software.
• Mentorship: Guide and mentor junior engineers, sharing your expertise and fostering a culture of technical excellence.
• Innovation: Stay ahead of the curve by researching and experimenting with emerging technologies and trends in the database and distributed systems space.

Qualifications:

• Experience: 10+ years of experience in software engineering, with a proven track record of delivering complex software solutions that improve availability, performance and scalability of the infrastructure
• Database Expertise: 6+ years of hands-on experience with MySQL and Distributed SQL, including schema design, query optimization, and performance tuning.
• Distributed Systems: Deep understanding of distributed systems concepts and experience with technologies like consensus algorithms, distributed transactions, and data replication.
• Problem Solving: Exceptional problem-solving and analytical skills, with the ability to identify, and resolve complex technical challenges and establish long-lasting solutions/processes.
• Programming Skills: Proficiency in at least two of Kotlin, Python, Go, Rust, with a strong emphasis on clean, maintainable code.
• Leadership: Demonstrated leadership and mentorship skills, with the ability to inspire and guide others. You can also work cross-functionally addressing technical challenges and influencing roadmaps outside your direct area of ownership.
• Innovate: You drive innovation in the platforms you build and operate, and have experience contributing to open-source projects. You are also passionate about engaging with the Distributed  systems/ Databases community. 
• Infrastructure as a Code (IaaC): Strong proficiency in operating automation tools to manage database infra like Terraform and Ansible.
• Communication: Excellent communication and interpersonal skills, with the ability to clearly articulate technical ideas to both technical and non-technical audiences.
• This position requires either equivalent practical experience or a Bachelor’s degree in a related field.

Base Pay Grade - R

Equity Grade - 15

Employees new to Affirm typically come in at the start of the pay range. Affirm focuses on providing a simple and transparent pay structure which is based on a variety of factors, including location, experience and job-related skills.

Base pay is part of a total compensation package that may include equity rewards, monthly stipends for health, wellness and tech spending, and benefits (including 100% subsidized medical coverage, dental and vision for you and your dependents.)

USA base pay range (CA, WA, NY, NJ, CT) per year: $260,000 - $310,000

USA base pay range (all other U.S. states) per year: $232,000 - $282,000

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