Responsibilities
- Set the team’s technical strategy over a year-long horizon and connect it to critical business-impacting projects.
- Design and build components of a multi-region, horizontally scalable, globally available, high-performance datastore platform.
- Develop control planes for managing and self-servicing hundreds of databases, including schema and data migrations, disaster recovery, sharding, and performance tuning.
- Collaborate with product, infrastructure, site reliability engineering, product management, design, and analytics teams on sustainable database solutions and technical trade-offs.
- Drive technical solutions and operational processes that multiply the team’s effectiveness.
- Own team operations and availability through monitoring, triage rotations, playbooks, policies, testing, alerting, and on-call support.
- Set and advocate for code review and design standards through writing and technical talks.
- Develop team talent through feedback, guidance, and technical leadership.
Requirements
- 8+ years of experience designing, developing, and launching backend systems at scale using languages such as Python or Kotlin.
- 5+ years of hands-on database expertise with relational and/or distributed SQL systems, including database performance optimization, data integrity, and efficient data access patterns.
- Deep understanding of schema design, query optimization, scaling, partitioning, sharding, and performance tuning across multiple environments.
- Strong experience building and operating databases in cloud environments, including database benchmarking, load testing, and capacity planning.
- Familiarity with connection poolers and proxies such as ProxySQL, RDS Proxy, and Pg Bouncer.
- Experience developing highly available distributed systems using technologies such as AWS, MySQL, Spark, and Kubernetes.
- Experience delivering major features or system components, deprecating functionality, and defining technical and execution plans.
- Ability to write high-quality, understandable, reusable code and work from low-level language details through large-system architecture.
- Strong verbal and written communication skills for collaboration with a global engineering team.
- Bachelor’s degree in a related field or equivalent practical experience.
Benefits
- Remote-first role, open only to candidates residing in Alberta, British Columbia, Manitoba, New Brunswick, Newfoundland and Labrador, Nova Scotia, Ontario, Prince Edward Island, or Saskatchewan.
- Affirm covers health care premiums for employees and dependents at all coverage levels.
- Flexible Spending Wallets provide stipends for technology, food, lifestyle needs, and family-forming expenses.
- Competitive vacation and holiday schedules.
- Employee stock purchase plan with discounted shares.
- Reasonable accommodations are available during the interview process.
Tech Stack
Categories
About Affirm
At Affirm, we’re using today’s technology to bring significant disruptive innovation to the financial industry. We focus on improving the lives of consumers by delivering simple, honest and transparent financial products. We have roles across a variety of teams, including engineering, product, finance, operations, revenue, marketing, people and more. A note to applicants: Fake job and recruiting scams are on the rise. Affirm will never ask you to pay any upfront fees or send you any checks to purchase equipment during any part of the recruiting process. Affirm only uses legitimate company email address domains (either “@affirm.com” or "@us.greenhouse-mail.io”) to communicate with candidates via email. Affirm is also proud to be a remote-first company! Attracting great people starts by finding talent in different places. That's why we built remote work into the DNA of how we do business—but if an office space is more your style, we have offices in Chicago, New York City, Pittsburgh, San Francisco, Seattle, Toronto, Warsaw, Madrid and London. Not to mention we have comprehensive and award-winning benefits that were made for you. Interested in learning more? Check out our careers page and apply today! Visit affirm.com/careers for more information.