Senior Backend Engineer: Distributed SQL & Storage (Remote)

Affirm; Windsor; Remote; CAD 153,000 - 213,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health coverage

Tech stipends

Flexible time off

ESPP

Job summary

Affim seeks a Senior Software Engineer to help build and scale relational and distributed SQL databases within our data platform. You will architect and operate the control plane for MySQL and TiDB deployments on Kubernetes, with a focus on reliability and zero-downtime upgrades.

The role is remote for candidates in Canada, with a competitive CAD salary and comprehensive benefits including equity. You will collaborate with product, design, analytics, and own on-call responsibilities.

Qualifications

• You have a total of 5+ years of experience as a software engineer.
• You are experienced in designing, developing and launching backend systems at scale technologies like Python, Kotlin, AWS, MySQL, Terraform and Kubernetes.
• You have in-depth, hands-on experience with large-scale database deployments in a production environment.
• You have expertise in distributed databases and database technologies such as MySQL(Preferred), TiDB(Preferred), Postgres, Spanner, Vitess, CockroachDB etc.
• Solid understanding of distributed database architecture, data modeling, and performance tuning. Particularly, expertise in SQL tuning and performance optimization techniques.
• You have expertise in database benchmarking, load testing, and capacity planning.
• You are familiar with connection poolers and proxies such as ProxySQL, RDS Proxy, Pg Bouncer, PgDog etc.
• You have built control-plane or automation tooling for databases, such as provisioning, failover, upgrades or schema migrations, ideally on Kubernetes.
• You have executed zero-downtime migrations and major version upgrades on production databases, and have built CLI tooling or runbooks to make those procedures repeatable.
• You understand Kubernetes networking, service discovery and TLS well enough to debug connection and failover problems between services and databases.
• You 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.
• You 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.
• Your experience demonstrates that you take ownership of your growth, proactively seeking feedback from your team, your manager, and your stakeholders.
• You have strong verbal and written communication skills that support effective collaboration with our global engineering team.
• This position requires either equivalent practical experience or a Bachelor’s degree in a related field.

Responsibilities

• You 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.
• You 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.
• You 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.
• You 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.
• You 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.
• You will proactively identify project, process, technology or business issues, advocate for them, and lead in solving them.
• You 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.
• You 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.
• You will help develop talent on your team by providing feedback and guidance, and leading by example.

Skills

Distributed systems

Backend development

Python

Kubernetes

MySQL

TiDB

AWS

SQL tuning

ProxySQL

Education

Bachelor's degree in related field

Tools

ProxySQL

RDS Proxy

Pg Bouncer

PgDog

Job description

Affim seeks a Senior Software Engineer to help build and scale relational and distributed SQL databases within our data platform. You will architect and operate the control plane for MySQL and TiDB deployments on Kubernetes, with a focus on reliability and zero-downtime upgrades.

The role is remote for candidates in Canada, with a competitive CAD salary and comprehensive benefits including equity. You will collaborate with product, design, analytics, and own on-call responsibilities.