Senior Backend Engineer, Distributed DBs (Remote)

Affirm; Charlotte (NC); Remote; USD 173,000 - 233,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health coverage after tax effects

Equity options

Flexible time off

Tech stipend

Job summary

Affirm is seeking a Senior Software Engineer to design and scale Relational and Distributed SQL databases, including MySQL and TiDB, on a Kubernetes-based platform. You will own end-to-end provisioning, failover, backups, and upgrades, while driving zero-downtime migrations and robust tooling.

You will collaborate with product, design and analytics, shaping the roadmap and ensuring reliability, performance and security across multi-tenant clusters.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of experience as a software engineer.
• Experience designing, developing and launching backend systems at scale.
• Experience with Python, Kotlin, AWS, MySQL, Terraform and Kubernetes.
• Hands-on experience with large-scale database deployments in production.
• Knowledge of distributed database architectures and performance tuning.

Responsibilities

• Build and operate the control plane for large-scale distributed SQL databases (MySQL, TiDB).
• Design reliability-focused schema and data migrations with zero downtime.
• Own the networking stack connecting services to storage on Kubernetes and tune for latency and failover.
• Deliver quarterly team goals and mentor engineers through ambiguity.
• Collaborate with product management, design, and analytics across the full development lifecycle.
• Identify and lead solutions to project, process, or technology issues.
• Monitor and improve artifacts and on-call readiness to keep systems healthy.
• Promote a culture of quality with code reviews and design standards.

Skills

Python

Kotlin

AWS

MySQL

Terraform

Kubernetes

Education

Bachelor’s degree or equivalent

Tools

ProxySQL

RDS Proxy

Pg Bouncer

PgDog

Job description

Affirm is seeking a Senior Software Engineer to design and scale Relational and Distributed SQL databases, including MySQL and TiDB, on a Kubernetes-based platform. You will own end-to-end provisioning, failover, backups, and upgrades, while driving zero-downtime migrations and robust tooling.

You will collaborate with product, design and analytics, shaping the roadmap and ensuring reliability, performance and security across multi-tenant clusters.