Senior Backend Engineer - Distributed SQL & Storage

Affirm; Pittsburgh (Allegheny County); Remote; USD 195,000 - 255,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health coverage for you and dependents

Monthly tech stipends

Flexible time off

Job summary

Affir is recruiting a Senior Software Engineer to architect and scale distributed SQL databases like MySQL and TiDB. You’ll own provisioning, migrations, and the networking stack on Kubernetes, collaborating with product, design, and analytics to deliver reliable data infrastructure.

This remote-first role includes equity rewards and a transparent pay structure. Base pay ranges from $195,000 to $255,000 annually in key US states; compensation may include health subsidies and other benefits.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of software engineering experience.
• Backend systems design, development and scaling at production level.
• Experience with large-scale database deployments and distributed DBs.
• Hands-on with MySQL/TiDB/Postgres and related tooling.
• Knowledge of performance tuning, benchmarking and capacity planning.

Responsibilities

• Build and operate control plane for large-scale distributed SQL databases (MySQL, TiDB).
• Automate provisioning, failover, backups and upgrades end-to-end.
• Design zero-downtime migrations and durable schema changes.
• Own networking across Kubernetes, including ProxySQL-based connections.
• Deliver quarterly team goals and mentor engineers through ambiguity.
• Collaborate with product, design and analytics in ideation and constraints.

Skills

Python

Kotlin

AWS

MySQL

Terraform

Kubernetes

Distributed databases

SQL tuning

Performance optimization

TiDB

Postgres

ProxySQL

RDS Proxy

PgBouncer

Terraform modules

Education

Bachelor’s degree or equivalent in a related field

Tools

ProxySQL

RDS Proxy

PgBouncer

PgDog

TiDB

MySQL

Kubernetes

Job description

Affir is recruiting a Senior Software Engineer to architect and scale distributed SQL databases like MySQL and TiDB. You’ll own provisioning, migrations, and the networking stack on Kubernetes, collaborating with product, design, and analytics to deliver reliable data infrastructure.

This remote-first role includes equity rewards and a transparent pay structure. Base pay ranges from $195,000 to $255,000 annually in key US states; compensation may include health subsidies and other benefits.