Senior Backend Engineer—Distributed SQL & Storage (Remote)

Affirm; Raleigh (NC); Remote; USD 173,000 - 255,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health coverage for you and dependents

Monthly tech stipends

Flexible time off

Employee stock purchase plan

Job summary

Affir is seeking a Senior Software Engineer to architect and scale distributed SQL databases (MySQL/TiDB) inside a remote-first environment. You will own control planes, migrations, and the networking stack on Kubernetes, driving reliability and performance.

You will collaborate with product management, design, and analytics, owning quarterly goals and mentoring team members while delivering high-quality, scalable infrastructure across the stack.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of software engineering experience.
• Backend systems design and scalable deployment experience.
• Experience with distributed databases (MySQL, TiDB, Postgres).
• Strong knowledge of Kubernetes networking and TLS.

Responsibilities

• Build and operate the control plane for distributed SQL databases.
• Design zero-downtime migrations and upgrades.
• Own the networking stack between services and storage on Kubernetes.
• Lead team goals and mentor engineers to deliver with quality and ownership.
• Collaborate with product management and analytics across the lifecycle.

Skills

Python

Kotlin

AWS

MySQL

Kubernetes

SQL tuning

Education

Bachelor’s degree or equivalent practical experience

Tools

ProxySQL

TiDB

PostgreSQL

Terraform

Kubernetes

Job description

Affir is seeking a Senior Software Engineer to architect and scale distributed SQL databases (MySQL/TiDB) inside a remote-first environment. You will own control planes, migrations, and the networking stack on Kubernetes, driving reliability and performance.

You will collaborate with product management, design, and analytics, owning quarterly goals and mentoring team members while delivering high-quality, scalable infrastructure across the stack.