Greenhouse ·
full-timeSenior Software Engineer, Backend (online Storage)
Affirm · Remote Canada
Affirm operates in the financial technology sector, providing transparent payment solutions that allow consumers to pay for purchases over time. This Senior Software Engineer role sits within the Data and Storage Services team, specifically focusing on the online storage infrastructure that supports the company's mission-critical financial transactional data. The position involves architecting, building, and scaling distributed SQL and relational database systems, including MySQL, TiDB, and Redis. Day-to-day responsibilities include managing the control plane for large-scale databases, automating provisioning and failover processes, and designing zero-downtime data migrations. The role also requires managing the networking stack on Kubernetes and optimizing connection proxies for resilience and latency. Beyond technical implementation, the engineer will lead team projects, set design standards, and mentor junior staff. This position is well-suited for a backend engineer with over five years of experience in large-scale distributed systems who possesses deep expertise in database internals, cloud infrastructure, and automation. Candidates should be comfortable navigating complex technical trade-offs and leading initiatives that improve the reliability and efficiency of core data platforms.
At Affirm, we exist for the moments that matter—giving people a clear, predictable way to pay over time, with no hidden fees, no surprises, and no tradeoffs on what matters most. The Data and Storage Services team is responsible for Affirm's data infrastructure across OLTP and OLAP systems, spanning critical online checkout databases, batch orchestration, streaming infrastructure, event-driven frameworks, BI, analytics tooling, large-scale data platforms, and agentic data tools such as semantic layers and internal platform data applications. Our mission is to provide trustworthy, intuitive, and cost-efficient solutions for Affirmers to secure, store, analyze, and transform data at exceptional scale. 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 Relational DB(MySQL), KV(DynamoDB), Distributed SQL(TiDB) and Cache(Redis). 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. We are looking for a talented Senior Software Engineer who can architect, build and scale Relational and Distributed SQL Databases identifying opportunities to improve how we build, productionize, operate and improve this mission-critical infrastructure to unlock substantial value within our business. You’ll have the opportunity to directly influence your team’s roadmap in close collaboration with your peers, share your knowledge and expertise with others and learn from some of the best on our shared mission to deliver honest financial products that improve lives. What you’ll do You will build and operate the control plane for large-scale distributed SQL databases such as MySQL and TiDB, automating provisioning, failover, backups and upgrades end to end. You will design and execute reliability-focused schema and data migrations across multi-tenant database clusters, with zero downtime for the products that depend on them. You will own the networking stack that connects services to storage on Kubernetes, including connection proxies such as ProxySQL, and tune it for latency, resilience and failover. You will be responsible for owning and delivering quarterly goals for your team, leading engineers on your team through ambiguity to solve open-ended problems, and ensuring that everyone is supported throughout delivery. You will support your peers and stakeholders in the product development lifecycle by collaborating with product management, design & analytics by participating in ideation, articulating technical constraints, and partnering on decisions that properly consider risks and trade-offs. You will proactively identify project, process, technology or business issues, advocate for them, and lead in solving them. You will support the operations and availability of your team’s artifacts by creating and monitoring metrics, escalating when needed, and supporting “keep the lights on” & on-call efforts. You will foster a culture of quality and ownership on your team by setting or improving code review and design standards for your team, and advocating for them beyond your team through your writing and tech talks. You will help develop talent on your team by providing feedback and guidance, and leading by example. What we look for You have a total of 5+ years of experience as a software engineer. You are experienced in designing, developing and launching backend systems at scale technologies like Python, Kotlin, AWS, MySQL, Terraform and Kubernetes. You have in-depth, hands-on experience with large-scale database deployments in a production environment. You have expertise in distributed databases and database technologies such as MySQL(Preferred), TiDB(Preferred), Postgres, Spanner, Vitess, CockroachDB etc. Solid understanding of distributed database architecture, data modeling, and performance tuning. Particularly, expertise in SQL tuning and performance optimization techniques. You have expertise in database benchmarking, load testing, and capacity planning. You are familiar with connection poolers and proxies such as ProxySQL, RDS Proxy, Pg Bouncer, PgDog etc. You have built control-plane or automation tooling for databases, such as provisioning, failover, upgrades or schema migrations, ideally on Kubernetes. You have executed zero-downtime migrations and major version upgrades on production databases, and have built CLI tooling or runbooks to make those procedures repeatable. You understand Kubernetes networking, service discovery and TLS well enough to debug connection and failover problems between services and databases. You have experience defining a technical plan for the delivery of a significant feature or system component with an elegant, simple and
| Role | Senior Software Engineer, Backend (online Storage) |
|---|---|
| Company | Affirm |
| Location | Remote Canada |
| Compensation | Not disclosed |
| Posted | 2026-09-30 |
| Deadline | Rolling |
Typical process for this type of role
A general guide — the exact steps for this specific listing may vary; check the original posting for details.
- 1ApplicationSubmit your resume through the apply link.
- 2ScreeningRecruiter reviews your background against the role.
- 3AssessmentA technical test, assignment, or coding round, depending on the role.
- 4Interview(s)One or more rounds with the hiring team.
- 5OfferOffer letter with compensation and start date.
Before you apply
0/4Senior Software Engineer, Backend (online Storage) at Affirm: frequently asked questions
- What is the salary for this role?
- Affirm has not stated compensation in the listing. Check the original posting or ask during the application process.
- Is the Senior Software Engineer, Backend (online Storage) position remote, hybrid or onsite?
- The listing marks this role as remote, with Remote Canada as the location.
- What is the application deadline?
- Affirm has not listed a fixed deadline, so apply early in case the opening is filled.
- How do I apply for the Senior Software Engineer, Backend (online Storage) role?
- Use the Apply button on this page. It opens the original listing on job-boards.greenhouse.io, where you submit your application with the company.
More at Affirm
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- Software Engineer (machine Learning) Intern (summer 2027) · San Francisco, California, United States
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