Senior Software Engineer

At Affirm, data is fundamental to everything we do. Our data and storage solutions empower machine learning, artificial intelligence, cloud-based technologies, and other modern tools to create differential and scalable products. We prioritize building our own technology and investing in engineering talent, as we believe these are enduring competitive advantages that are difficult to replicate. Our expertise in sourcing, aggregating, protecting, and analyzing data has been what we believe to be a core competitive advantage of our platform since our founding. We use data to inform our analysis and decision-making, including risk assessment, in a way that empowers consumers and generates value for our merchants and funding sources. 

The Online Storage team provides a set of managed databases as a platform, used to persist data for all Affirm services. Our platform automates operations and development on services on top of storage systems like AWS Aurora (MySQL), DynamoDB, and S3. 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 requiring us to learn and gain deep expertise in various database systems. Our mission is to provide trustworthy, intuitive, and cost-efficient solutions to secure, store, analyze, and transform data at exceptional scale. 

Affirm is growing fast and we want you to enable us to scale our products to 10x and beyond through building world-class systems which enable Affirm in its mission to provide honest financial products which improve lives.

We are only just getting started! Come join us as we build a beloved, lasting financial services brand predicated on honesty and trust. It’s going to be an amazing ride!

Role

As a member of the Online Storage team, you will combine a strong understanding of application architecture, smooth developer experiences and fast-paced execution to deliver a powerful self-serve system to help Affirm scale easily. This will need you to apply a customer-centric approach across the engineering organization to help the team craft and execute on a long-term roadmap.

What you’ll do

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

• Leading projects 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

You will also have the opportunity to learn bleeding edge open source technologies as we build the future of Affirm’s Online Storage platform.

What we look for

• Bachelors or Masters degree in Computer Science with 5+ 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.

What you’ll learn

Join us as we build a beloved, lasting financial services company predicated on honesty and trust. In this role, you’ll understand the exciting challenges of helping a fast-growing company move towards a service-oriented architecture - diving into the scaling and availability challenges of infrastructural components that are the fundamental building blocks of a large scale system. You’ll hone your ability to anticipate and recognize how to apply different technologies to solve a wide array of real world problems across the organization - all while building teams and working cross functionally with hardworking peers.

Please refer to some work from Online Storage Team https://tech.affirm.com/scaling-our-database-for-peak-season-a-60-latency-reduction-bonus-92d0b2b097f3

Pay Grade - N
Equity Grade - 8

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: $190,000 - $240,000
USA base pay range (all other U.S. states) per year: $169,000 - $219,000

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