Senior Backend Engineer, Distributed SQL Platform - Remote

Affirm; Chicago (IL); Remote; USD 173,000 - 255,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health coverage for you and dependents

Tech setup stipends

Flexible time off

ESPP

Job summary

affirm is seeking a Senior Software Engineer to architect, build, and scale relational and distributed SQL databases in a remote-first environment. You will automate provisioning, backups, failover, and upgrades across multi-tenant clusters.

The role emphasizes zero-downtime migrations, Kubernetes networking, and owning reliability-focused data operations while mentoring teammates and shaping roadmaps.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of software engineering experience with backend systems at scale.
• Experience designing and deploying large-scale databases in production.
• Hands-on with MySQL, TiDB, Postgres or similar distributed DBs.
• Strong SQL tuning, performance optimization and benchmarking skills.
• Experience with provisioning, failover, upgrades and migrations on Kubernetes.

Responsibilities

• Build and operate the control plane for large-scale distributed SQL databases.
• Design zero-downtime migrations and major version upgrades.
• Own networking to storage on Kubernetes and tuning for latency and failover.
• Deliver quarterly team goals and mentor engineers through ambiguity.
• Collaborate with product mgmt, design and analytics in lifecycle.

Skills

5+ years experience

Backend systems

Distributed databases

SQL tuning

Code ownership

Team leadership

Education

Bachelor's degree

Tools

MySQL

TiDB

Postgres

Kubernetes

ProxySQL

Terraform

AWS

Job description

affirm is seeking a Senior Software Engineer to architect, build, and scale relational and distributed SQL databases in a remote-first environment. You will automate provisioning, backups, failover, and upgrades across multi-tenant clusters.

The role emphasizes zero-downtime migrations, Kubernetes networking, and owning reliability-focused data operations while mentoring teammates and shaping roadmaps.