Remote Senior Backend Engineer - Distributed SQL & Storage

Affirm; San Diego (CA); Remote; USD 195,000 - 255,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health coverage for you and dependents

Monthly technology setup stipends

Flexible time off

Employee stock purchase plan (ESPP)

Job summary

Affir is seeking a Senior Software Engineer to architect and scale Relational and Distributed SQL databases, including MySQL and TiDB. You will own provisioning, failover, backups, and upgrades, and drive zero-downtime migrations on Kubernetes.

The role emphasizes ownership, collaboration with product, design and analytics, and delivering reliable data infrastructure. You will influence roadmaps, shape data platform tooling, and participate in on-call and reliability initiatives across

Qualifications

• 5+ years of software engineering experience.
• Experience designing, developing and launching backend systems at scale using Python, Kotlin, AWS, MySQL, Terraform and Kubernetes.
• Hands-on experience with large-scale database deployments in production.
• Expertise in distributed databases such as MySQL, TiDB, Postgres, Spanner, Vitess, CockroachDB.
• Strong understanding of SQL tuning and performance optimization.
• Experience with benchmarking, load testing, and capacity planning.
• Familiarity with connection poolers and proxies like ProxySQL, RDS Proxy, PgBouncer.
• Built control-plane or automation tooling for databases, especially on Kubernetes.
• Zero-downtime migrations and major version upgrades in production environments.
• Understanding Kubernetes networking, service discovery and TLS for debugging connections.
• Ability to define technical plans and deliver significant features with clean design.
• Proven ownership, feedback-seeking and strong communication.

Responsibilities

• Build and operate the control plane for large-scale distributed SQL databases (MySQL, TiDB), including provisioning, failover, backups, and upgrades.
• Design reliable schema and data migrations across multi-tenant clusters with zero downtime.
• Own networking stack connecting services to storage on Kubernetes; tune latency, resilience and failover.
• Deliver quarterly team goals and mentor engineers through ambiguity.
• Collaborate with product management, design and analytics in ideation and trade-off decisions.
• Identify and drive solutions to project, process, or technology issues.
• Keep artifacts up and running with metrics, on-call support, and incident handling.
• Promote code quality, review standards and transfer knowledge through writing and talks.
• Develop talent via feedback and leading by example.

Skills

5+ years of software engineering

Python

Kotlin

AWS

MySQL

Terraform

Kubernetes

ProxySQL

Education

Bachelor's degree in a related field

Tools

TiDB

PostgreSQL

Vitess

CockroachDB

Job description

Affir is seeking a Senior Software Engineer to architect and scale Relational and Distributed SQL databases, including MySQL and TiDB. You will own provisioning, failover, backups, and upgrades, and drive zero-downtime migrations on Kubernetes.

The role emphasizes ownership, collaboration with product, design and analytics, and delivering reliable data infrastructure. You will influence roadmaps, shape data platform tooling, and participate in on-call and reliability initiatives across