Senior Software Engineer, backend (Online Storage)

Engg; United States; Remote; USD 140,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

Affim is seeking a Senior Software Engineer to architect and scale distributed SQL databases and related storage platforms. You will own control planes, migrations, and the networking stack on Kubernetes, helping shape the team's roadmap and mentor peers.

The role emphasizes reliability, performance, and collaboration across product and analytics teams. You will work on provisioning, failover, upgrades, and schema migrations with zero downtime, while optimizing for latency and resilience in a

Qualifications

• 5+ years of software engineering experience.
• Experience designing, developing and launching backend systems at scale.
• Hands-on with large-scale database deployments in production.
• Expertise in distributed databases and related technologies (MySQL, TiDB, Postgres, Vitess, CockroachDB).
• Strong SQL tuning, benchmarking, load testing and capacity planning.
• Proficiency with Kubernetes networking and related tooling.
• Experience building control planes or automation for databases on Kubernetes.

Responsibilities

• Build and operate control plane for large-scale distributed SQL databases (MySQL, TiDB).
• Design zero-downtime migrations across multi-tenant clusters.
• Own networking between services and storage on Kubernetes, including proxies.
• Deliver quarterly team goals and mentor engineers.
• Collaborate with product, design and analytics to align on constraints and risks.
• Identify and solve project, process, tech, or business issues.
• Monitor artifacts, ensure reliability, and support on-call duties.
• Uphold code quality standards and evangelize them beyond the team.

Skills

Distributed systems

Backend design

Kubernetes

Database tuning

Performance optimization

Python

Terraform

AWS

Networking & TLS

Education

Bachelor's degree in CS or related field

Tools

MySQL

TiDB

PostgreSQL

Vitess

ProxySQL

PgBouncer

Terraform

Kubernetes

AWS

Job description

At Affim, we exist for the moments that matter- giving people a clear, predictable way to pay over time, with no hidden fees, no surprises, and no tradeoffs on what matters most. The Data and Storage Services team is responsible for affirm's data infrastructure across OLTP and OLAP systems, spanning critical online checkout databases, batch orchestration, streaming infrastructure, event-driven frameworks, BI, analytics tooling, large-scale data platforms, and agentic data tools such as semantic layers and internal platform data applications. Our mission is to provide trustworthy, intuitive, and cost-efficient solutions for affirmers to secure, store, analyze, and transform data at exceptional scale. The Online Storage team provides a set of managed databases as a platform, used to persist data for all affirm services. Our platform enables self-service access to OLTP storage systems, including Relational DB(MySQL), KV(DynamoDB), Distributed SQL(TiDB) and Cache(Redis). As a team, we are responsible for various data and access patterns, including but not limited to mission-critical financial transactional data, data science models, and any new persistence use case. These responsibilities require us to learn and gain deep expertise in various database systems. We are looking for a talented Senior Software Engineer who can architect, build and scale Relational and Distributed SQL Databases identifying opportunities to improve how we build, productionize, operate and improve this mission-critical infrastructure to unlock substantial value within our business. You'll have the opportunity to directly influence your team's roadmap in close collaboration with your peers, share your knowledge and expertise with others and learn from some of the best on our shared mission to deliver honest financial products that improve lives.

What you'll do

• You will build and operate the control plane for large-scale distributed SQL databases such as MySQL and TiDB, automating provisioning, failover, backups and upgrades end to end.
• You will design and execute reliability-focused schema and data migrations across multi-tenant database clusters, with zero downtime for the products that depend on them.
• You will own the networking stack that connects services to storage on Kubernetes, including connection proxies such as ProxySQL, and tune it for latency, resilience and failover.
• You will be responsible for owning and delivering quarterly goals for your team, leading engineers on your team through ambiguity to solve open-ended problems, and ensuring that everyone is supported throughout delivery.
• You will support your peers and stakeholders in the product development lifecycle by collaborating with product management, design & analytics by participating in ideation, articulating technical constraints, and partnering on decisions that properly consider risks and trade-offs.
• You will proactively identify project, process, technology or business issues, advocate for them, and lead in solving them.
• You will support the operations and availability of your team's artifacts by creating and monitoring metrics, escalating when needed, and supporting keep the lights on & on-call efforts.
• You will foster a culture of quality and ownership on your team by setting or improving code review and design standards for your team, and advocating for them beyond your team through your writing and tech talks.
• You will help develop talent on your team by providing feedback and guidance, and leading by example.

What we look for

• You have a total of 5+ years of experience as a software engineer.
• You are experienced in designing, developing and launching backend systems at scale technologies like Python, Kotlin, AWS, MySQL, Terraform and Kubernetes.
• You have in-depth, hands-on experience with large-scale database deployments in a production environment.
• You have expertise in distributed databases and database technologies such as MySQL(Preferred), TiDB(Preferred), Postgres, Spanner, Vitess, CockroachDB etc.
• Solid understanding of distributed database architecture, data modeling, and performance tuning.
• Particularly, expertise in SQL tuning and performance optimization techniques.
• You have expertise in database benchmarking, load testing, and capacity planning.
• You are familiar with connection poolers and proxies such as ProxySQL, RDS Proxy, Pg Bouncer, PgDog etc.
• You have built control-plane or automation tooling for databases, such as provisioning, failover, upgrades or schema migrations, ideally on Kubernetes.
• You have executed zero-downtime migrations and major version upgrades on production databases, and have built CLI tooling or runbooks to make those procedures repeatable.
• You understand Kubernetes networking, service discovery and TLS well enough to debug connection and failover problems between services and databases.
• You have experience defining a technical plan for the delivery of a significant feature or system component with an elegant, simple and extensible design.
• You write high quality code that is easily understood and used by others.
• You are proficient at making significant changes in a large code base, and have developed a suite of tools and practices that enable you and your team to do so safely.
• Your experience demonstrates that you take ownership of your growth, proactively seeking feedback from your team, your manager, and your stakeholders.
• You have strong verbal and written communication skills that support effective collaboration with our global engineering team.

This position requires either equivalent practical experience or a Bachelor's degree in a related field.

This remote role is open only to candidates residing in Alberta, British Columbia, Manitoba, New Brunswick, Newfoundland and Labrador, Nova Scotia, Ontario, Prince Edward Island, or Saskatchewan.

Pay Grade - N Equity Grade - 6 Employees new to affirm typically come in at the start of the pay range. affirm focuses on providing a simple and transparent pay