Senior Backend Engineer - Distributed SQL (Remote)

Affirm; New York (NY); Remote; USD 195,000 - 255,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health coverage for you and dependents

Tech setup stipends

Flexible time off

Job summary

Affirm is seeking a Senior Software Engineer, Backend (Online Storage) to architect and scale relational and distributed SQL databases. You will own the control plane, automate provisioning, upgrades, and migrations, and optimize the networking stack for low latency on Kubernetes.

You’ll collaborate with product, design, and analytics to deliver reliable data infrastructure that supports online checkout data and analytics workloads. Remote-first in the US.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of software engineering experience.
• Experience designing, developing and launching backend systems at scale.
• Hands-on experience with large-scale database deployments in production.
• Expertise in distributed databases and database technologies (MySQL, TiDB, Postgres, Spanner, Vitess, CockroachDB).
• SQL tuning and performance optimization.
• Experience with benchmarking, load testing and capacity planning.
• Familiarity with connection poolers and proxies (ProxySQL, RDS Proxy, PgBouncer).
• Experience building control-plane or automation tooling for databases on Kubernetes.
• Experience with zero-downtime migrations and major version upgrades.
• Understanding of Kubernetes networking, service discovery and TLS for debugging connectivity.
• Proven ability to own and deliver significant features with clean, extensible design.
• Strong communication and collaboration skills.
• Bachelor’s degree or equivalent practical experience.

Responsibilities

• Build and operate the control plane for large-scale distributed SQL databases (MySQL, TiDB).
• Automate provisioning, failover, backups and upgrades end-to-end.
• Design and execute zero-downtime migrations across multi-tenant clusters.
• Own the networking stack connecting services to storage on Kubernetes and tune for latency and resilience.
• Deliver quarterly team goals and mentor engineers through ambiguity.
• Collaborate with product management, design and analytics across the lifecycle.
• Identify and drive resolution of project, process, technology or business issues.
• Maintain metrics and support on-call efforts to keep systems running.
• Improve code quality and establish design standards beyond the team.
• Develop talent by providing feedback and leading by example.

Skills

Backend systems

Distributed SQL

MySQL

TiDB

Kubernetes

Terraform

Python

AWS

Education

Bachelor’s degree in related field

Tools

ProxySQL

RDS Proxy

PgBouncer

Job description

Affirm is seeking a Senior Software Engineer, Backend (Online Storage) to architect and scale relational and distributed SQL databases. You will own the control plane, automate provisioning, upgrades, and migrations, and optimize the networking stack for low latency on Kubernetes.

You’ll collaborate with product, design, and analytics to deliver reliable data infrastructure that supports online checkout data and analytics workloads. Remote-first in the US.