Senior Software Engineer (Online Storage SRE)

Affirm is reinventing credit to make it more honest and friendly, giving consumers the flexibility to buy now and pay later without any hidden fees or compounding interest.

Affirm is reinventing credit to make it more honest and friendly, giving consumers the flexibility to buy now and pay later without any hidden fees or compounding interest. Affirm proudly includes Returnly. 

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. 

Our mission is to provide trustworthy, intuitive, and cost-efficient solutions 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 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. 

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!

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:

• Working with engineers managing Affirm’s distributed database technologies, including AWS Aurora MySQL and DynamoDB
• Leading projects towards improving our database architecture, focusing on scalability, reliability, performance, and cost efficiency
• Work closely with product teams to understand business requirements and translate them into robust database solutions.
• Develop and enforce best practices in database design, 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

What we look for

• BS degree in Computer Science with 3-5+ years of experience as a software engineer/ SRE 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 , CockroachDB etc
• Expertise in Database/Table and backup-recovery management.
• Expertise in SQL tuning and performance optimization techniques
• Expertise in database scaling, benchmarking, load testings, and capacity planning.
• Familiarity with connection poolers and proxies such as ProxySQL, RDS Proxy Pg Bouncer, etc
• Solid understanding of distributed database architecture, data modeling, and performance tuning
• Proficiency in Python or Kotlin or both
• Proficiency in Scripting and troubleshooting.
• Expertise to create and triage database alerts and issues, identify root causes, and implement corrective solutions.
• 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 

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 infrastructu