Senior Backend Engineer Distributed SQL & Storage (Remote)

Affirm, Inc.; St. Louis (MO); Remote; USD 170,000 - 255,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health coverage for you and dependents

Monthly tech stipend

Flexible time off

Employee stock purchase plan

Job summary

Affir in the United States is seeking a Senior Software Engineer to architect and scale relational and distributed SQL databases, focusing on MySQL and TiDB. You’ll own the control plane, perform zero-downtime migrations, and own the Kubernetes networking stack to ensure reliable, low-latency connections.

You’ll collaborate with product, design, and analytics, setting quarterly goals and leading engineers through ambiguity while delivering high-impact infrastructure improvements in a

Qualifications

• 5+ years of experience as a software engineer.
• Experience designing, developing and launching backend systems at scale technologies like Python, Kotlin, AWS, MySQL, Terraform and Kubernetes.
• Hands-on experience with large-scale database deployments in a production environment.
• Expertise in distributed databases and database technologies such as MySQL, TiDB, Postgres, Spanner, Vitess, CockroachDB.
• Strong understanding of distributed database architecture, data modeling, and performance tuning (SQL tuning).
• Experience with database benchmarking, load testing, and capacity planning.
• Familiarity with connection poolers and proxies such as ProxySQL, RDS Proxy, PgBouncer, PgDog.
• Built control-plane or automation tooling for databases (provisioning, failover, upgrades, migrations) on Kubernetes.
• Experience with zero-downtime migrations and major version upgrades in production.
• Knowledge of Kubernetes networking, service discovery, TLS, and failover debugging.
• Ability to plan, document, and deliver significant features with simple, extensible designs.
• Strong habits for safe large-scale code changes and toolchains.
• Proven ownership of personal and team growth through feedback.
• Excellent verbal and written communication for global collaboration.
• Bachelor’s degree or equivalent practical experience.

Responsibilities

• Build and operate the control plane for large-scale distributed SQL databases (MySQL, TiDB) and automate provisioning, backups and upgrades.
• Design and execute zero-downtime migrations across multi-tenant clusters with minimal product impact.
• Own the networking stack connecting services to storage on Kubernetes and tune for latency and failover.
• Lead your team to deliver quarterly goals, guiding engineers through ambiguity and providing support.
• Collaborate with product, design and analytics through ideation, constraints, and risk/trade-off decisions.
• Identify and drive solutions to project, process, technology, or business issues.
• Monitor artifacts, escalate when needed, and support on-call efforts to keep systems running.
• Set and promote code reviews and design standards across teams to improve quality.
• Mentor colleagues and contribute to talent development through feedback and example.

Skills

Backend design

Distributed databases

Kubernetes

Python

Kotlin

MySQL

TiDB

PostgreSQL

SQL tuning

Proxy servers

Education

Bachelor’s degree or equivalent experience

Tools

ProxySQL

RDS Proxy

PgBouncer

PgDog

Job description

Affir in the United States is seeking a Senior Software Engineer to architect and scale relational and distributed SQL databases, focusing on MySQL and TiDB. You’ll own the control plane, perform zero-downtime migrations, and own the Kubernetes networking stack to ensure reliable, low-latency connections.

You’ll collaborate with product, design, and analytics, setting quarterly goals and leading engineers through ambiguity while delivering high-impact infrastructure improvements in a