Senior Backend Architect, Distributed SQL & Storage (Remote)

Affirm; Phoenix (AZ); Remote; USD 173,000 - 233,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health coverage and stipends

Time off and flexible holidays

Employee stock purchase plan

Job summary

Affir is seeking a Senior Software Engineer to architect, build, and scale relational and distributed SQL databases that power our data infrastructure. You will lead the control plane, automate provisioning, backups, upgrades, and optimize the networking stack on Kubernetes with proxies like ProxySQL.

You’ll work closely with product, design and analytics to balance risk and speed, own quarterly goals, and drive zero-downtime migrations and large-scale deployments using MySQL, TiDB and related

Qualifications

• 5+ years of experience as a software engineer.
• Experience designing, developing and launching backend systems at scale.
• Hands-on experience with large-scale database deployments in production.
• Expertise in distributed database technologies (MySQL, TiDB, Postgres, Spanner, Vitess, CockroachDB).
• Strong knowledge of SQL tuning, performance optimization, benchmarking and capacity planning.
• Experience with Kubernetes networking and service discovery.

Responsibilities

• Build and operate the control plane for large-scale distributed SQL databases.
• Design and execute zero-downtime migrations and major version upgrades.
• Own networking between services and storage on Kubernetes, including ProxySQL.
• Lead the team, define quarterly goals, and mentor engineers.
• Collaborate with product, design and analytics through the full development lifecycle.
• Identify and solve technical and process issues proactively.
• Maintain 'keep the lights on' mindset with metrics and on-call readiness.
• Set and promote code design standards and a culture of ownership.

Skills

Backend systems

Distributed architectures

Code review

Ownership & leadership

Education

Bachelor's degree or equivalent

Tools

Python

Kotlin

AWS

Terraform

Kubernetes

MySQL

TiDB

ProxySQL

Job description

Affir is seeking a Senior Software Engineer to architect, build, and scale relational and distributed SQL databases that power our data infrastructure. You will lead the control plane, automate provisioning, backups, upgrades, and optimize the networking stack on Kubernetes with proxies like ProxySQL.

You’ll work closely with product, design and analytics to balance risk and speed, own quarterly goals, and drive zero-downtime migrations and large-scale deployments using MySQL, TiDB and related