Senior Backend Engineer, Distributed SQL & Storage (Remote)

Affirm; Salt Lake City (UT); Remote; USD 173,000 - 255,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health coverage for you & dependents

Monthly tech stipend

Flexible time off

Employee stock purchase plan

Job summary

Affir is seeking a Senior Software Engineer to architect, build, and scale relational and distributed SQL databases, including MySQL and TiDB, on Kubernetes. You will own provisioning, failover, backups, upgrades, and zero-downtime migrations for multi-tenant clusters.

Join a remote-first team that emphasizes reliability, performance, and ownership. You will work with product, design, and analytics to drive impactful, scalable data infrastructure across checkout platforms and analytics tooling.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of software engineering experience.
• Design, develop and launch backend systems at scale.
• Experience with distributed databases and data modeling.
• Expertise in SQL tuning and performance optimization.

Responsibilities

• Build and operate control plane for large-scale distributed SQL databases.
• Design zero-downtime migrations and upgrades in production.
• Own networking stack connecting services to storage on Kubernetes.
• Deliver quarterly goals and mentor teammates.
• Collaborate with product, design and analytics in lifecycle decisions.
• Identify and solve project/process/technology issues.
• Maintain observability and on-call readiness.
• Promote code quality and ownership across the team.
• Develop talent through feedback and leadership.

Skills

5+ years software engineering

Backend systems design

Distributed databases

SQL tuning

Education

Bachelor’s degree or equivalent

Tools

MySQL

TiDB

Postgres

Spanner

Vitess

CockroachDB

ProxySQL

RDS Proxy

Pg Bouncer

Kubernetes

Terraform

Job description

Affir is seeking a Senior Software Engineer to architect, build, and scale relational and distributed SQL databases, including MySQL and TiDB, on Kubernetes. You will own provisioning, failover, backups, upgrades, and zero-downtime migrations for multi-tenant clusters.

Join a remote-first team that emphasizes reliability, performance, and ownership. You will work with product, design, and analytics to drive impactful, scalable data infrastructure across checkout platforms and analytics tooling.