Senior Backend Engineer, Distributed SQL & Storage (Remote)

Affirm; Austin (TX); Remote; USD 173,000 - 233,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health coverage for you and dependents

Tech setup stipends

Flexible time off

Employee stock purchase plan

Job summary

Affir is hiring a Senior Software Engineer to architect, build, and scale relational and distributed SQL databases. You’ll automate provisioning, backups, upgrades, and migrations, while owning the networking stack on Kubernetes.

Expect collaboration with product, design, and analytics to deliver reliable, scalable data infrastructure. You’ll drive reliability, standards, and tooling, mentor teammates, and contribute to a remote-first culture with strong emphasis on ownership and impact.

Qualifications

• 5+ years as a software engineer.
• Experience designing and launching backend systems at scale.
• Hands-on with large-scale database deployments in production.
• Knowledge of distributed DBs (MySQL, TiDB, Postgres, Spanner, Vitess, CockroachDB).

Responsibilities

• Build and operate the control plane for large-scale distributed SQL databases.
• Design zero-downtime migrations across multi-tenant clusters.
• Own the networking stack connecting services to storage on Kubernetes.
• Deliver quarterly team goals and mentor engineers.
• Collaborate with product management, design, and analytics.
• Identify and solve platform-wide issues with initiative.

Skills

Python

Kotlin

AWS

Terraform

Kubernetes

MySQL

TiDB

SQL tuning

Distributed databases

Education

Bachelor's degree or equivalent

Tools

MySQL

TiDB

Postgres

Spanner

Vitess

CockroachDB

Job description

Affir is hiring a Senior Software Engineer to architect, build, and scale relational and distributed SQL databases. You’ll automate provisioning, backups, upgrades, and migrations, while owning the networking stack on Kubernetes.

Expect collaboration with product, design, and analytics to deliver reliable, scalable data infrastructure. You’ll drive reliability, standards, and tooling, mentor teammates, and contribute to a remote-first culture with strong emphasis on ownership and impact.