Sr Software Engineer: Distributed DB on Kubernetes

Affirm; Boise (ID); Remote; USD 173,000 - 255,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

100% covered health insurance

Tech setup stipend

Flexible time off

ESPP

Job summary

affirm is seeking a Senior Software Engineer to architect, build and scale relational and distributed SQL databases, shaping our data infrastructure for scale. You’ll influence the team’s roadmap and collaborate with peers to deliver trustworthy data platforms. You’ll own the control plane for MySQL and TiDB clusters, design migrations with zero downtime, and manage networking on Kubernetes with ProxySQL.

Remote-first with flexible in-person onboarding. Base pay for U.S.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of experience as a software engineer.
• Experience in designing, developing and launching backend systems at scale technologies like Python, Kotlin, AWS, MySQL, Terraform and Kubernetes.
• Hands-on experience with large-scale database deployments in a production environment.
• Expertise in distributed databases and database technologies such as MySQL(Preferred), TiDB(Preferred), Postgres, Spanner, Vitess, CockroachDB etc.
• Strong understanding of distributed database architecture, data modeling, and performance tuning. Particularly, SQL tuning and performance optimization.
• Experience in database benchmarking, load testing, and capacity planning.
• Familiar with connection poolers and proxies such as ProxySQL, RDS Proxy, Pg Bouncer, PgDog etc.
• Built control-plane or automation tooling for databases, such as provisioning, failover, upgrades or schema migrations, ideally on Kubernetes.
• Zero-downtime migrations and major version upgrades on production databases, with repeatable runbooks.
• Understand Kubernetes networking, service discovery and TLS for debugging connections.
• Able to define a technical plan for delivering significant features with simple, extensible design.
• Strong in making large code base changes with safe tooling and processes.
• Demonstrated ownership of growth and proactive feedback seeking.
• Strong communication skills for collaboration with a global engineering team.
• Bachelor’s degree or equivalent practical experience in a related field.

Responsibilities

• You will build and operate the control plane for large-scale distributed SQL databases such as MySQL and TiDB.
• Design and execute reliability-focused schema and data migrations across multi-tenant clusters with zero downtime.
• Own the networking stack connecting services to storage on Kubernetes, including ProxySQL and tuning for latency and failover.
• Deliver quarterly team goals, mentor engineers, and support delivery.
• Collaborate with product management, design & analytics through ideation and decision-making.
• Identify and lead solutions to project, process, technology or business issues.
• Support operations and availability of team artifacts with metrics and on-call readiness.
• Foster code quality and ownership by establishing review and design standards.
• Help develop talent through feedback and leadership by example.

Skills

5+ years of experience as a software

Backend systems at scale

Python

Kotlin

AWS

MySQL

Terraform

Kubernetes

Distributed SQL databases

SQL tuning

Database benchmarking

ProxySQL / RDS Proxy

Zero-downtime migrations

Kubernetes networking

Code ownership & tooling

Technical planning

Strong communication

Education

Bachelor’s degree or equivalent practical experience

Tools

ProxySQL

RDS Proxy

PgBouncer

PgDog

Job description

affirm is seeking a Senior Software Engineer to architect, build and scale relational and distributed SQL databases, shaping our data infrastructure for scale. You’ll influence the team’s roadmap and collaborate with peers to deliver trustworthy data platforms. You’ll own the control plane for MySQL and TiDB clusters, design migrations with zero downtime, and manage networking on Kubernetes with ProxySQL.

Remote-first with flexible in-person onboarding. Base pay for U.S.