Senior Backend Architect - Distributed SQL DB (Remote)

Affirm; Washington (District of Columbia); Remote; USD 173,000 - 233,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health coverage

Stipends for tech setup

Flexible time off

ESPP

Job summary

Affir is seeking a Senior Software Engineer to architect, build and scale relational and distributed SQL databases within our Online Storage team. You will own provisioning, failover, backups, and upgrades across multi-tenant clusters.

You will work with Python and Kotlin, AWS, Kubernetes, and SQL tuning, shaping the reliability of our data platform while partnering with product, design, and analytics. This remote-first role offers competitive base pay in the U.S.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of software engineering experience.
• Experience designing backend systems at scale with Python/Kotlin.
• Hands-on with large-scale database deployments in production.
• Expertise in distributed databases like MySQL, TiDB, Postgres, Spanner.
• Knowledge of connectivity proxies like ProxySQL, RDS Proxy.
• Zero-downtime migrations and upgrades experience.
• Kubernetes networking and TLS debugging.
• Strong communication skills.
• Bachelor’s degree or equivalent practical experience.

Responsibilities

• Build and operate the control plane for large-scale distributed SQL databases.
• Design reliability-focused schema migrations across multi-tenant clusters.
• Own networking stack connecting services to storage on Kubernetes.
• Deliver quarterly team goals and mentor engineers.
• Collaborate with product, design, and analytics across lifecycle.
• Identify and solve project, process, tech, or business issues.
• Monitor artifacts with metrics and support on-call efforts.
• Set code review and design standards and promote them.
• Develop talent through feedback and leadership by example.

Skills

5+ years experience

Backend systems

Distributed databases

SQL tuning

Education

Bachelor's degree or equivalent

Tools

Python

Kotlin

AWS

MySQL

Terraform

Kubernetes

ProxySQL

RDS Proxy

Job description

Affir is seeking a Senior Software Engineer to architect, build and scale relational and distributed SQL databases within our Online Storage team. You will own provisioning, failover, backups, and upgrades across multi-tenant clusters.

You will work with Python and Kotlin, AWS, Kubernetes, and SQL tuning, shaping the reliability of our data platform while partnering with product, design, and analytics. This remote-first role offers competitive base pay in the U.S.