Senior Software Engineer, Backend (Online Storage)

Location: Remote within the United States; occasional in-person onboarding is required.

Base pay: $195,000–$255,000 per year in CA, WA, NY, NJ, and CT; $173,000–$233,000 per year in other U.S. states.

Company

Affirm provides transparent financial products that let people pay over time without hidden fees.

What you will do

• Build and operate control-plane automation for large-scale MySQL and TiDB databases, including provisioning, failover, backups, and upgrades.
• Design and execute reliable schema and data migrations across multi-tenant clusters with zero downtime.
• Own the Kubernetes networking stack connecting services to storage, including ProxySQL and related connection infrastructure.
• Define quarterly goals, lead engineers through ambiguous problems, and support delivery across the team.
• Collaborate with product management, design, and analytics to evaluate technical constraints, risks, and trade-offs.
• Improve operational reliability through monitoring, on-call support, code review standards, technical writing, and mentoring.

Requirements

• 5+ years of software engineering experience or equivalent practical experience; a related Bachelor’s degree is also accepted.
• Experience designing, developing, and launching backend systems at scale using technologies such as Python, Kotlin, AWS, MySQL, Terraform, and Kubernetes.
• Hands-on experience with large-scale production database deployments, distributed database architecture, data modeling, SQL tuning, and performance optimization.
• Experience with database benchmarking, load testing, capacity planning, connection poolers, and proxies.
• Experience building database control-plane or automation tooling, executing zero-downtime migrations, and performing major production upgrades.
• Strong understanding of Kubernetes networking, service discovery, TLS, technical planning, code quality, and collaboration.

Nice to have

• Experience with MySQL, TiDB, Postgres, Spanner, Vitess, CockroachDB, ProxySQL, RDS Proxy, PgBouncer, or PgDog.
• Experience creating repeatable CLI tooling and runbooks for database operations.

Culture & Benefits

• Remote-first work with flexibility within the country of employment.
• 100% subsidized medical coverage, dental and vision coverage for employees and dependents.
• Monthly technology, health, and wellness stipends.
• Flexible time off and generous holiday calendars.
• Employee stock purchase plan with discounted Affirm stock.

Hiring process

• Inclusive interview process with accommodations available for candidates with disabilities.
• New hires attend an in-person onboarding experience.