Senior Distributed SQL Database Architect — Remote

Affirm; Palo Alto (CA); Remote; USD 195,000 - 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

Affirm is seeking a Senior Software Engineer to architect, build, and scale Relational and Distributed SQL databases (MySQL, TiDB) within the Online Storage platform. You will own provisioning, failover, backups, and upgrades across multi-tenant clusters on Kubernetes, while driving reliability and performance improvements.

You will collaborate with product, design, and analytics to shape roadmaps, and lead efforts for zero-downtime migrations, latency optimization, and SQL tuning.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of software engineering experience.
• Experience designing, developing and launching backend systems at scale (Python, Kotlin, AWS, MySQL, Terraform, Kubernetes).
• Hands-on experience with large-scale database deployments in production.
• Expertise in distributed databases and DB tech (MySQL, TiDB, Postgres, Spanner, Vitess, CockroachDB).
• Strong understanding of distributed DB architecture, data modeling and performance tuning.

Responsibilities

• Build and operate the control plane for large-scale distributed SQL databases (MySQL, TiDB).
• Design and execute zero-downtime migrations across multi-tenant clusters.
• Own networking stack connecting services to storage on Kubernetes; tune for latency and failover.
• Deliver quarterly team goals and mentor engineers through ambiguity.
• Collaborate with product/design/analytics in lifecycle decisions.
• Identify and lead solving project/process/tech issues.
• Maintain artifacts with metrics and on-call support.
• Set code review and design standards and propagate them.

Skills

5+ years software engineering

Backend systems design

Distributed databases

Python

Kotlin

AWS

Terraform

Kubernetes

SQL tuning

Education

Bachelor's degree in related field

Tools

MySQL

TiDB

Postgres

Spanner

Vitess

CockroachDB

ProxySQL

PgBouncer

RDS Proxy

Job description

Affirm is seeking a Senior Software Engineer to architect, build, and scale Relational and Distributed SQL databases (MySQL, TiDB) within the Online Storage platform. You will own provisioning, failover, backups, and upgrades across multi-tenant clusters on Kubernetes, while driving reliability and performance improvements.

You will collaborate with product, design, and analytics to shape roadmaps, and lead efforts for zero-downtime migrations, latency optimization, and SQL tuning.