Senior Distributed SQL Database Engineer - Remote

Affirm; Sioux Falls (SD); Remote; USD 173,000 - 255,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health coverage for you and dependents

Monthly tech stipends

Generous time-off calendar

Employee stock purchase plan

Job summary

Affirm is hiring a Senior Software Engineer to architect, build, and scale relational and distributed SQL databases that power our data infrastructure. You will influence team roadmaps, collaborate across product, design, and analytics, and own end-to-end reliability for mission-critical systems.

You will design zero-downtime migrations, optimize latency, and advance the control plane for MySQL/TiDB on Kubernetes.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of experience as a software engineer.
• 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 (MySQL, TiDB, Postgres, Spanner, Vitess, CockroachDB).
• Knowledge of distributed database architecture, data modeling and performance tuning (SQL tuning).
• Experience with database benchmarking, load testing and capacity planning.
• Familiarity with connection poolers/proxies (ProxySQL, RDS Proxy, Pg Bouncer, PgDog).
• Built control-plane or automation tooling for databases on Kubernetes.
• Experience with zero-downtime migrations and major upgrades; prepared runbooks/CLI tooling.
• Understanding of Kubernetes networking, service discovery and TLS.

Responsibilities

• Build and operate the control plane for large-scale distributed SQL databases (MySQL, TiDB).
• Automate provisioning, failover, backups, upgrades end to end.
• Design migrations with zero downtime for 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/UX/analytics in ideation and decision-making.
• Identify and solve project, process, technology, or business issues.
• Maintain artifacts with metrics, on-call support, and reliability practices.
• Advocate for code quality, design standards, and secure ownership.

Skills

5+ years experience

Backend systems design

Python

Kotlin

AWS

MySQL

Terraform

Kubernetes

Distributed databases

SQL tuning

ProxySQL/RDS Proxy

Zero-downtime migrations

CLI/runbooks

Kubernetes networking

Education

Bachelor’s degree or equivalent

Tools

ProxySQL

RDS Proxy

Pg Bouncer

PgDog

Job description

Affirm is hiring a Senior Software Engineer to architect, build, and scale relational and distributed SQL databases that power our data infrastructure. You will influence team roadmaps, collaborate across product, design, and analytics, and own end-to-end reliability for mission-critical systems.

You will design zero-downtime migrations, optimize latency, and advance the control plane for MySQL/TiDB on Kubernetes.