Senior Staff Machine Learning Engineer, Affirm
ML Underwriting
CA$206-256k
+ ESPP
Buy-now-pay-later card for online and in-store
Open for applications
Buy-now-pay-later card for online and in-store
1001+ employees
Open for applications
CA$206-256k
+ ESPP
1001+ employees
Company mission
To deliver honest and transparent financial products that improve users' lives.
Role
Who you are
- If you are passionate about modern machine learning and excited to drive high-impact innovation across a growing organization, Affirm is the place for you
- You have 10+ years of experience researching, designing, deploying, and operating large-scale, real-time machine learning systems, with a proven record of driving technical innovation and delivering measurable business impact. Relevant PhD can count for up to 2 YOE
- You have experience leading end-to-end ML system design, from data architecture and feature pipelines to model training, evaluation, and production deployment. You use distributed frameworks such as Spark, Ray, or similar large-scale data processing systems
- You are proficient in Python and ML frameworks, including PyTorch and XGBoost. You are experienced with ML tooling for training orchestration, experimentation, and model monitoring, such as Kubeflow, MLflow, or equivalent internal platforms
- You have a strong understanding of representation learning and embedding-based modeling. You possess deep expertise in neural network-based sequence modeling, including architectures such as Transformers, recurrent, or attention-based models, and multi-task learning systems. You are comfortable designing and optimizing models that learn from sequential or temporal event data at scale
- You have deep hands-on experience with large-scale distributed ML infrastructure, including streaming or batch data ingestion, feature stores, feature engineering, training pipelines, model serving and inference infrastructure, monitoring, and automated retraining
- You provide strong technical leadership: defining long-term strategy, guiding research direction, and aligning work across teams. You are recognized as a trusted expert who can drive clarity and execution even in ambiguous problem spaces
- You demonstrate exceptional judgment, collaboration, and communication skills, enabling effective technical discussions with engineers, researchers, and executives. You mentor senior engineers, foster technical excellence, and contribute to a culture of continuous learning
- You have strong verbal and written communication skills that support effective collaboration across our global engineering organization
- This position requires equivalent practical experience or a Bachelor’s degree in a related field
What the job involves
- Join the Affirm team as a Senior Staff Machine Learning Engineer and become a pivotal part of our innovative ML team
- Our team is dedicated to Affirm's mission of revolutionizing financial services with transparency and inclusivity at its core
- We are utilizing advanced machine learning techniques ensuring responsible and accessible financial products
- In this role, you will help shape the future of machine learning at Affirm
- You’ll partner with ML Platform, engineering, product, and risk leaders to design, implement, and scale advanced modeling approaches that drive critical decisions across the company
- You will elevate our modeling capabilities, influence architectural direction, and ensure our systems can support increasingly sophisticated workloads
- You will mentor senior engineers, bring clarity to complex, ambiguous problems, and contribute to a cohesive long-term ML strategy
- You will define and drive multi-year, multi-team technical strategy for machine learning across Affirm, ensuring alignment with company-wide priorities and influencing the roadmaps of partner teams and platforms
- You will lead the design, implementation, and scaling of advanced ML systems, setting the architectural direction for complex, cross-functional initiatives and ensuring systems remain reliable, extensible, and prepared for increasingly sophisticated modeling workloads
- You will partner deeply with ML Platform, product, engineering, and risk leadership to shape long-term modeling capabilities, define new opportunities for ML impact, and guide infrastructure evolution required for next-generation ML methods
- You will provide broad technical leadership across the ML organization, mentoring senior engineers, elevating design and code quality, and spreading ML expertise through documentation, talks, and cross-org guidance
- You will drive clarity and alignment on ambiguous, high-stakes technical decisions, resolving cross-team tensions, balancing competing priorities, and exercising judgment optimized for the broader engineering organization
- You will champion operational and system excellence at the area level, owning the long-term health, availability, and evolution of critical ML systems, and ensuring robust testing, monitoring, and reliability practices across teams
Our take
Affirm offers point-of-sale loans to consumers, working with merchants like Shopify, KAYAK, and Walmart. Buy now, pay later transactions have grown in popularity in recent years, and this business is tapping into the market with a totally different approach to credit - by delivering the Affirm card, the first US debit card with the option to pay-over-time.
Serving over 21 million consumers and over 300,000 merchants, the company offers flexible payback options ranging from 3 to 36 months. The interest rates run between 0% and 30%, so, while they are not necessarily the cheapest option, Affirm prides itself on having no fees for late payments, no hidden charges, and total transparency about what people will pay before they take out a loan.
Affirm collects payments from the customers and pays the merchants directly, shouldering the risk itself. The company has boosted its market share, expanding its availability beyond the US to include most of Canada, and continues to launch new features and create new partnerships towards bettering its offering.
Kirsty
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
-11% employee growth in 12 months
Company
Funding (last 2 of 5 rounds)
Sep 2020
$500m
SERIES G
Apr 2019
$300m
SERIES F
Total funding: $1.1bn
Company benefits
- Compensation: We have a simple, flexible, and transparent remote-first compensation structure so you can make the best decisions for yourself and your family
- Spending Wallets: Access tech, food, lifestyle, and family planning wallets for your expenses
- Supportive Communities: Get involved with our employee resource groups and community groups
- Remote-first Workforce: If your role is remote, you can set up shop anywhere in your home country
- Generous Time Off: Take the time you need when life happens
- Health Benefits: Get a plan that fits your needs
- Mental Healthcare: Take care of your mind with great mental health programs
- Parental Leave: Birth and non-birth parents get 18 weeks’ paid leave. Plus, a 4-week return-to-work transition program, at full base pay
- Away Days: We offer 20 company-wide paid days off—which help our teams collectively pause to recharge
- Learning & Development: Engage in exciting learning programs to level up your growth
Company HQ
Chinatown, San Francisco, CA
Leadership
Max Levchin
(Co-Founder & CEO)Has founded/co-founded numerous companies, holding various executive positions at each, including Paypal, Slide, Glow, HVF Labs, and SciFi VC. Also worked at large brands including Google, Yelp, Yahoo, and Evernote.
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