Senior Distributed SQL Database Engineer - Remote-First

Affirm; Los Angeles (CA); Remote; USD 195,000 - 255,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Remote-first with flexibility

Health coverage for you and dependents

Employee stock purchase plan (ESPP)

Tech setup stipends

Job summary

Affirm is building a robust data infrastructure to power our payments platform. As a Senior Software Engineer, you will architect and scale relational and distributed SQL databases, govern provisioning, failover, backups, upgrades, and migrations, and partner across teams to deliver reliable, secure data services.

You will help design the networking stack on Kubernetes, optimize latency, ensure zero-downtime deployments, and drive a culture of quality and ownership from the ground up.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of experience as a software engineer.
• Experience designing, developing and launching backend systems at scale with Python, Kotlin, AWS and Kubernetes.
• Hands-on experience with large-scale database deployments in production.
• Expertise in distributed databases and technologies (MySQL, TiDB, Postgres, etc.).
• Knowledge of zero-downtime migrations and major version upgrades.

Responsibilities

• Build and operate the control plane for large-scale distributed SQL databases (MySQL,TiDB).
• Design reliable schema and data migrations with zero downtime.
• Own networking for storage on Kubernetes and tuning for latency and failover.
• Lead team delivery, set quarterly goals, mentor engineers.

Skills

Python

Kotlin

AWS

MySQL

Terraform

Kubernetes

Distributed databases

SQL tuning

Education

Bachelor’s degree in a related field

Tools

ProxySQL

RDS Proxy

PgBouncer

PgDog

Kubernetes

Job description

Affirm is building a robust data infrastructure to power our payments platform. As a Senior Software Engineer, you will architect and scale relational and distributed SQL databases, govern provisioning, failover, backups, upgrades, and migrations, and partner across teams to deliver reliable, secure data services.

You will help design the networking stack on Kubernetes, optimize latency, ensure zero-downtime deployments, and drive a culture of quality and ownership from the ground up.