Senior Backend Engineer - Remote Storage & SQL

Affirm; Boulder (CO); Remote; USD 173,000 - 233,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health coverage at no cost

Monthly tech stipends

Generous time off

ESPP stock purchase plan

Job summary

Affir is building a world‑class data platform. We seek a Senior Software Engineer to architect and scale relational and distributed SQL databases, driving reliability, performance, and cost efficiency across our storage and analytics stack.

You will own the control plane for databases like MySQL and TiDB, design zero‑downtime migrations, and optimize the networking stack on Kubernetes, collaborating across product, design and analytics to move our platform forward.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of experience designing, developing and launching backend systems at scale.
• Hands-on experience with large-scale database deployments in production.
• Experience with distributed databases (MySQL/TiDB/Postgres/Vitess/CockroachDB).
• Ability to own control-plane tooling for databases and zero-downtime migrations.

Responsibilities

• Build and operate the control plane for large-scale distributed SQL databases (MySQL, TiDB).
• Design reliable schema and data migrations with zero downtime across multi-tenant clusters.
• Own networking stack that connects services to storage on Kubernetes (ProxySQL, proxies).
• Deliver quarterly team goals and guide engineers through ambiguity.
• Collaborate with product, design and analytics in ideation and decision-making.

Skills

5+ years experience

Backend systems at scale

Python

Kotlin

AWS

Kubernetes

Education

Bachelor’s degree or equivalent

Tools

MySQL

TiDB

Postgres

Vitess

CockroachDB

ProxySQL

Terraform

Kubernetes

Job description

Affir is building a world‑class data platform. We seek a Senior Software Engineer to architect and scale relational and distributed SQL databases, driving reliability, performance, and cost efficiency across our storage and analytics stack.

You will own the control plane for databases like MySQL and TiDB, design zero‑downtime migrations, and optimize the networking stack on Kubernetes, collaborating across product, design and analytics to move our platform forward.