Senior Backend Engineer — Distributed SQL & Data Platform

Affirm; Houston (TX); Remote; USD 173,000 - 255,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health coverage

Spending stipends

Flexible time off

Employee stock purchase plan

Job summary

Affirm is seeking a Senior Software Engineer to architect, build, and scale Relational and Distributed SQL databases (MySQL, TiDB) on Kubernetes. You will own the control plane, migrations with zero downtime, and the networking stack for storage access.

You’ll deliver quarterly goals, lead engineers, and partner with product, design, and analytics. This remote-first role emphasizes ownership and scalable data infrastructure.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of experience as a software engineer.
• Experience designing, developing and launching backend systems at scale.
• Hands-on with large-scale database deployments in production.
• Expertise in distributed databases and related technologies.
• Experience provisioning, failover, upgrades or schema migrations on Kubernetes.
• Ability to perform zero-downtime migrations and major version upgrades.

Responsibilities

• Build and operate the control plane for large-scale distributed SQL databases.
• Design and execute zero-downtime migrations across multi-tenant clusters.
• Own the networking stack to connect services to storage on Kubernetes.
• Deliver quarterly team goals and mentor engineers.
• Collaborate with product management, design, and analytics on requirements and trade-offs.
• Proactively identify issues and drive solutions.
• Maintain metrics and on-call readiness for the team's artifacts.
• Set and promote code review and design standards across the organization.
• Develop talent through feedback and leadership by example.

Skills

Python

Kotlin

AWS

MySQL

Terraform

Kubernetes

Distributed DBs

SQL tuning

ProxySQL

Education

Bachelor's degree in a related field

Tools

TiDB

Postgres

Spanner

Vitess

CockroachDB

Job description

Affirm is seeking a Senior Software Engineer to architect, build, and scale Relational and Distributed SQL databases (MySQL, TiDB) on Kubernetes. You will own the control plane, migrations with zero downtime, and the networking stack for storage access.

You’ll deliver quarterly goals, lead engineers, and partner with product, design, and analytics. This remote-first role emphasizes ownership and scalable data infrastructure.