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Senior Software Engineer, backend (Online Storage)

Affirm· Infrastructure Platform Eng
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RemoteCA$153k - CA$213kfull-timePosted 2w ago

About the role

Senior software engineer role focused on architecting, building, and scaling relational and distributed SQL databases (MySQL, TiDB, etc.) within Affirm's Online Storage platform. Responsible for control planes, zero-downtime migrations, networking to storage on Kubernetes, and leading a team to deliver reliable, scalable data infrastructure.

Responsibilities

  • 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.
  • Design and execute reliability-focused schema and data migrations across multi-tenant database clusters, with zero downtime for the products that depend on them.
  • 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.
  • Deliver quarterly goals for the team, lead engineers through ambiguity, and support delivery.
  • Collaborate with product management, design, analytics during ideation and decision-making considering risks and trade-offs.
  • Identify and lead resolution of project, process, technology, or business issues.
  • Support operations and availability of team artifacts through metrics, on-call, and escalation activities.
  • Foster a culture of quality and ownership by setting and upholding code review and design standards.
  • Develop talent by providing feedback and leading by example.

Qualifications

  • 5+ years of software engineering experience.
  • Experience designing, developing and launching backend systems at scale using Python, Kotlin, AWS, MySQL, Terraform and Kubernetes.
  • Hands-on experience with large-scale production database deployments.
  • Expertise in distributed databases and technologies such as MySQL, TiDB, Postgres, Spanner, Vitess, CockroachDB.
  • Strong understanding of distributed database architecture, data modeling, and SQL performance tuning.
  • Experience in database benchmarking, load testing, and capacity planning.
  • Familiarity with connection poolers/proxies such as ProxySQL, RDS Proxy, PgBouncer, PgDog.
  • Built control-plane or automation tooling for databases (provisioning, failover, upgrades, migrations), ideally on Kubernetes.
  • Experience zero-downtime migrations and major version upgrades with repeatable tooling.
  • Understanding of Kubernetes networking, service discovery and TLS for debugging connections/failover.
  • Ability to define a technical plan for delivering significant features with elegant, extensible design.
  • Proven ability to make safe, large changes in a big codebase and build tools to enable this.
  • Strong communication skills for global collaboration.
  • Equivalent practical experience or Bachelor’s degree in a related field.

Skills

Required:Distributed SQL databasesKubernetesControl-plane / automation tooling for databases
Nice to have:Proxy/Connection poolers

Benefits

  • 100% premium coverage for employee and dependents health insurance.
  • Monthly stipends for tech setup and health/wellness options.
  • Flexible time off and generous holiday calendar.
  • Employee stock purchase plan (ESPP) to buy Affirm stock at a discount.
Last updated Oct 7, 2026. Interested? Apply on the company site.

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