Senior Backend Engineer, Distributed SQL Storage (Remote)

Affirm; San Juan de Terranova; Remote; CAD 153,000 - 213,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

100% health coverage for you and your

Monthly tech stipends

Flexible time off

Employee stock purchase plan

Job summary

Affim is seeking a Senior Software Engineer to architect, build, and scale relational and distributed SQL databases. You will automate provisioning, backups, and upgrades, and own the networking stack on Kubernetes to ensure low latency and strong failover.

You will influence the team roadmap, mentor engineers, and collaborate with product, design, and analytics to drive reliable data infrastructure that powers critical financial services. This remote-first role is Canada-based.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of experience as a software engineer.
• Experience designing, developing and launching backend systems at scale (Python, Kotlin, AWS, MySQL, Terraform, Kubernetes).
• Hands-on experience with large-scale database deployments in production.
• Expertise in distributed databases (MySQL, TiDB, Postgres, Spanner, Vitess, CockroachDB).
• Strong SQL tuning and performance optimization knowledge.
• Experience with benchmarking, load testing and capacity planning.
• Familiarity with connection poolers and proxies (ProxySQL, RDS Proxy, Pg Bouncer, PgDog).
• Built control-plane or automation tooling for databases on Kubernetes.

Responsibilities

• Build and operate the control plane for large-scale distributed SQL databases.
• Design and execute zero-downtime migrations across multi-tenant clusters.
• Own networking stack between services and storage on Kubernetes.
• Lead team to deliver quarterly goals and mentor engineers.
• Collaborate with product management, design & analytics in the lifecycle of product development.
• Identify and lead resolution of project, process, or tech issues.
• Monitor metrics, support on-call efforts, and maintain operations.
• Foster code quality and ownership through standards and writing/tech talks.
• Develop talent through feedback and guidance.

Skills

5+ years experience

Backend design & scaling

Distributed databases

SQL tuning

System reliability

Education

Bachelor's degree or equivalent

Tools

Python

Kotlin

AWS

MySQL

Terraform

Kubernetes

ProxySQL

RDS Proxy

PgBouncer

PgDog

Job description

Affim is seeking a Senior Software Engineer to architect, build, and scale relational and distributed SQL databases. You will automate provisioning, backups, and upgrades, and own the networking stack on Kubernetes to ensure low latency and strong failover.

You will influence the team roadmap, mentor engineers, and collaborate with product, design, and analytics to drive reliable data infrastructure that powers critical financial services. This remote-first role is Canada-based.