Senior Backend Engineer - Distributed SQL & Online Storage

Affirm; Philadelphia (Philadelphia County); Remote; USD 173,000 - 255,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health coverage

Tech stipends

Flexible time off

Employee stock purchase plan

Job summary

Affir is a remote-first company hiring a Senior Software Engineer for its Data and Storage Services team. You’ll build and scale relational and distributed SQL databases (MySQL, TiDB) and automation tooling, owning provisioning, failover, backups, upgrades, and the networking stack on Kubernetes with ProxySQLs and proxies.

You will contribute to reliability, performance and scale, collaborating across product, design and analytics, and shaping quarterly goals while mentoring teammates in a

Qualifications

• 5+ years of experience as a software engineer.
• Experience designing, developing and launching backend systems at scale with Python, Kotlin, AWS, MySQL, Terraform and Kubernetes.
• Hands-on experience with large-scale database deployments in production.
• Expertise in distributed databases (MySQL, TiDB, Postgres, Spanner, Vitess, CockroachDB).
• Strong SQL tuning and performance optimization knowledge.
• Benchmarking, load testing and capacity planning experience.
• Familiar with connection poolers/proxies such as ProxySQL, RDS Proxy, PgBouncer, PgDog.
• Built control-plane or automation tooling for databases on Kubernetes.
• Zero-downtime migrations and major version upgrades; CLI/runbooks.
• Kubernetes networking, service discovery and TLS troubleshooting.
• Ability to craft technical plans for delivery of major features with clean, extensible design.
• Ability to make significant codebase changes with scalable tooling and practices.
• Ownership mindset with proactive growth and feedback seeking.
• Strong written and verbal communication for global engineering collaboration.
• Equivalency or Bachelor's degree in a related field.

Responsibilities

• Build and operate the control plane for large-scale distributed SQL databases (MySQL, TiDB), automating provisioning, failover, backups and upgrades.
• Design and execute reliable migrations across multi-tenant clusters with zero downtime.
• Own the networking stack to connect services to storage on Kubernetes, including ProxySQL.
• Lead quarterly team goals and support engineers through ambiguity during delivery.
• Collaborate with product management, design and analytics in the lifecycle and decision making.
• Identify and solve project, process, technology or business issues.
• Support operations and availability of team artifacts; monitor metrics and run on-call duties.
• Promote code quality and ownership by setting review standards and sharing knowledge.
• Develop talent by mentoring and leading by example.

Skills

Python

Kotlin

AWS

MySQL

Terraform

Kubernetes

SQL tuning

Load testing

Capacity planning

ProxySQL

RDS Proxy

PgBouncer

PgDog

Automation tooling

Education

Bachelor’s degree or equivalent in a related field

Tools

ProxySQL

RDS Proxy

PgBouncer

PgDog

Job description

Affir is a remote-first company hiring a Senior Software Engineer for its Data and Storage Services team. You’ll build and scale relational and distributed SQL databases (MySQL, TiDB) and automation tooling, owning provisioning, failover, backups, upgrades, and the networking stack on Kubernetes with ProxySQLs and proxies.

You will contribute to reliability, performance and scale, collaborating across product, design and analytics, and shaping quarterly goals while mentoring teammates in a