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Senior Software Engineer, Backend (Online Storage)

Affirm· Infrastructure Platform Eng
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Remote$195k - $255kFull-timePosted 2w ago

About the role

Senior Software Engineer responsible for architecting, building, and scaling relational and distributed SQL databases within Affirm's Online Storage platform, with a focus on provisioning, reliability, migrations, networking to storage on Kubernetes, and driving team goals.

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 your team, lead engineers through ambiguity, and support delivery.
  • Collaborate with product management, design & analytics to ideate, articulate technical constraints, and partner on decisions with risk/trade-offs.
  • Identify and lead solving project, process, technology or business issues.
  • Support operations and availability of team artifacts by creating and monitoring metrics, escalating when needed, and supporting on-call efforts.
  • Foster a culture of quality and ownership by setting/improving code review and design standards, and advocating beyond the team.
  • Develop talent on the team through feedback, guidance, and leading by example.

Qualifications

  • 5+ years of experience as a software engineer.
  • Experience designing, developing and launching backend systems at scale using Python, Kotlin, AWS, MySQL, Terraform and Kubernetes.
  • Hands-on experience with large-scale database deployments in production.
  • Expertise in distributed databases and technologies such as MySQL, TiDB, Postgres, Spanner, Vitess, CockroachDB.
  • Solid understanding of distributed database architecture, data modeling, and performance tuning (SQL tuning and optimization).
  • Experience in database benchmarking, load testing, and capacity planning.
  • Familiar with connection poolers/proxies such as ProxySQL, RDS Proxy, PgBouncer, PgDog.
  • Built control-plane or automation tooling for databases (provisioning, failover, upgrades, schema migrations), ideally on Kubernetes.
  • Experience with zero-downtime migrations and major version upgrades in production; built CLI tooling/runbooks for repeatability.
  • Understanding of Kubernetes networking, service discovery, and TLS to debug connections/failovers.
  • Ability to define a technical plan for delivering significant features with elegant design.
  • Proven ability to make significant changes in large codebases and build supporting tools/practices.
  • Demonstrated ownership of growth through seeking feedback.
  • Strong verbal and written communication for global collaboration.
  • Equivalent practical experience or a Bachelor's degree in a related field.

Skills

Required:Backend system design at scaleDistributed databasesDatabase migrations (zero-downtime)Kubernetes networkingControl-plane / automation tooling for databasesCollaboration and communication
Nice to have:Proxy/connection poolers

Benefits

  • Health coverage at no cost (employees and dependents).
  • Monthly tech setup stipends and health/wellness options.
  • Flexible time off and generous holiday calendar.
  • Employee stock purchase plan (ESPP) at a discount.
Last updated Oct 7, 2026. Interested? Apply on the company site.

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