{"id":1565787,"url":"https://alion.io/job/affirm-senior-software-engineer-backend-online-storage","title":"Senior Software Engineer, backend (Online Storage)","company":{"id":572,"name":"Affirm","domain":"affirm.com","url":"https://alion.io/company/affirm","size_band":null,"is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Greenhouse","truth_index":{"grade":"B","score":74,"open_postings":7,"ghost_share":0,"stale_share":0.857,"repost_share":0,"time_to_fill_p50_days":68,"computed_at":"2026-10-13T05:45:00Z"}},"role":"Backend","role_family":"Backend","seniority":"senior","employment_type":null,"work_mode":"remote","remote_scope":"stated_countries","remote_scope_basis":"posting_text","remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"inferred","locations":["Canada"],"countries":["CA"],"hiring_countries":["US","CA"],"hiring_countries_total":2,"salary":{"min":153000,"max":213000,"currency":"CAD","period":"year","gross":null,"usd_annual":149234},"salary_estimate":null,"experience_years_min":5,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":true,"technologies":[{"name":"AI Agents","optional":false},{"name":"AWS","optional":false},{"name":"CockroachDB","optional":false},{"name":"DynamoDB","optional":false},{"name":"Google Cloud Spanner","optional":false},{"name":"Kotlin","optional":false},{"name":"Kubernetes","optional":false},{"name":"MySQL","optional":false},{"name":"PostgreSQL","optional":false},{"name":"Python","optional":false},{"name":"Redis","optional":false},{"name":"SQL","optional":false},{"name":"Terraform","optional":false},{"name":"TiDB","optional":false}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-09-30T21:33:51Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-09-30","last_verified_at":"2026-10-13T15:37:03Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":12,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":null,"flags":[],"days_open":12},"description":"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.\nThe 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.\nThe 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. \nWe 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.\nWhat you’ll do\nYou 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.\nYou 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.\nYou 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.\nYou 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.\nYou 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.\nYou will proactively identify project, process, technology or business issues, advocate for them, and lead in solving them.\nYou 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.\nYou 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.\nYou will help develop talent on your team by providing feedback and guidance, and leading by example.\nWhat we look for\nYou have a total of 5+ years of experience as a software engineer.\nYou are experienced in designing, developing and launching backend systems at scale technologies like Python, Kotlin, AWS, MySQL, Terraform and Kubernetes.\nYou have in-depth, hands-on experience with large-scale database deployments in a production environment.\nYou have expertise in distributed databases and database technologies such as MySQL(Preferred), TiDB(Preferred), Postgres, Spanner, Vitess, CockroachDB etc.\nSolid understanding of distributed database architecture, data modeling, and performance tuning. Particularly, expertise in SQL tuning and performance optimization techniques.\nYou have expertise in database benchmarking, load testing, and capacity planning.\nYou are familiar with connection poolers and proxies such as ProxySQL, RDS Proxy, Pg Bouncer, PgDog etc.\nYou have built control-plane or automation tooling for databases, such as provisioning, failover, upgrades or schema migrations, ideally on Kubernetes.\nYou have executed zero-downtime migrations and major version upgrades on production databases, and have built CLI tooling or runbooks to make those procedures repeatable.\nYou understand Kubernetes networking, service discovery and TLS well enough to debug connection and failover problems between services and databases.\nYou have experience defining a technical plan for the delivery of a significant feature or system component with an elegant, simple and extensible design. You write high quality code that is easily understood and used by others.\nYou are proficient at making significant changes in a large code base, and have developed a suite of tools and practices that enable you and your team to do so safely.\nYour experience demonstrates that you take ownership of your growth, proactively seeking feedback from your team, your manager, and your stakeholders.\nYou have strong verbal and written communication skills that support effective collaboration with our global engineering team.\nThis position requires either equivalent practical experience or a Bachelor’s degree in a related field.\nThis remote role is open only to candidates residing in Alberta, British Columbia, Manitoba, New Brunswick, Newfoundland and Labrador, Nova Scotia, Ontario, Prince Edward Island, or Saskatchewan.\nPay Grade - N\nEquity Grade - 6\nEmployees 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.\nBase 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.)\nCAN base pay range per year: $153,000 - 213,000 CAD.\nThis posting is for an existing vacancy.\nRemote-first with flexibility built in\n Affirm is proud to be a remote-first company. Most roles can be done from almost anywhere within the country of employment. Some positions may occasionally require in-person work at an Affirm office, and a few are office-based due to the nature of the work. All new hires will be invited to attend an in-person onboarding experience.\nBenefits designed for you \n Our benefits reflect our commitment to care, transparency, and flexibility. Here are a few highlights:\nHealth coverage at no cost: We cover 100% of premiums for employees and their dependents.\nSpending stipends: Monthly stipends support your tech setup, and the ability to choose health and wellness options that are right for you.\nTime off to recharge: Flexible time off and generous holiday calendars help you rest when you need to.\nOwn a piece of what you build: Our employee stock purchase plan (ESPP) lets you buy Affirm stock at a discount.\nWe’re committed to providing an inclusive interview process, including accommodations for candidates with disabilities. If you need support, we’re happy to help.\nFor positions based in San Francisco or Los Angeles: Affirm considers qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records, as required by law.\nBy clicking \"Submit Application,\" you acknowledge that you have read Affirm's Global Candidate Privacy Notice and consent to the use of your personal information as described.","description_format":"text","description_chars":7879,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":5,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":{"level":"bachelor","optional":false},"security_clearance":false,"languages":[]},"benefits":["Equity","Flexible time off"],"hiring_locations":[{"name":"United States","iso":"US","kind":"country"},{"name":"Canada","iso":"CA","kind":"country"}],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":["Buy Now, Pay Later"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-10-01T06:04:01Z"}],"visa":[],"liveness":{"score":90,"band":"hot","label":"Hiring now","p_open":1,"p_active":0.903,"p_room":1,"age_days":12,"expected_fill_days":68,"reasons":["conf:1","velocity","win:early","comp:brand"],"computed_at":"2026-10-13T05:45:00Z"},"pay":{"stated_usd_annual":149234,"is_top_pay":false},"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/affirm-senior-software-engineer-backend-online-storage","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/affirm-senior-software-engineer-backend-online-storage.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-10-13T16:06:57Z","cache_seconds":300,"methodology":"https://alion.io/methodology","terms":"https://alion.io/terms","contact":"https://alion.io/contact","api":"https://alion.io/developers","about":"Alion is a live layer of people, companies and AI agents: who they are, whether they are real and active right now, what they do and how to work with them, readable by people and by agents and paid per call.","catalog":"https://alion.io/catalog.json","usage":{"tier":"crawler_verified","counted_by":"address","units_charged":1,"used_today":24516,"day_limit":null,"remaining_today":null,"minute_limit":300,"resets_at":"2026-10-14T00:00:00Z"}},"offers":[{"id":"company.slices","title":"One company in depth, by slice","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002,"plus_per_slice":{"credits":0.05,"usd":0.005}},"unit":"per company, plus each slice with data","note":"the employer in depth","call":{"mcp_tool":"get_company","arguments":{"id":572},"rest":"https://alion.io/mcp/rest/get_company?id=572"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.slices&for=job%2Faffirm-senior-software-engineer-backend-online-storage"},{"id":"market.stats","title":"A market slice: pay, demand and time to fill","status":"live","price":{"credits":1,"usd":0.1},"unit":"per slice","note":"pay, demand and time to fill for this role and place","call":{"mcp_tool":"market_stats"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=market.stats&for=job%2Faffirm-senior-software-engineer-backend-online-storage"},{"id":"job.search","title":"Open jobs by role, technology, place, pay and visa","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002},"unit":"per posting in a list","note":"similar open postings","call":{"mcp_tool":"search_jobs"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=job.search&for=job%2Faffirm-senior-software-engineer-backend-online-storage"},{"id":"company.verify","title":"Is this company real and active right now","status":"pilot","price":null,"unit":"per company","request":{"url":"https://alion.io/catalog/request","method":"POST","body":"{\"offer\": \"company.verify\", \"for\": \"job/affirm-senior-software-engineer-backend-online-storage\", \"note\": \"what you need it for\"}"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.verify&for=job%2Faffirm-senior-software-engineer-backend-online-storage"}]}