Job Title

Senior Staff Machine Learning Engineer (ML Underwriting) Apply at Affirm Affirm is reinventing credit to make it more honest and friendly, giving consumers the flexibility to buy now and pay later without any hidden fees or compounding interest. 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. Youll 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 longterm ML strategy. If you are passionate about modern machine learning and excited to drive highimpact innovation across a growing organization, Affirm is the place for you. What Youll Do You will define and drive multiyear, multiteam technical strategy for machine learning across Affirm, ensuring alignment with companywide 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, crossfunctional 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 longterm modeling capabilities, define new opportunities for ML impact, and guide infrastructure evolution required for nextgeneration 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 crossorg guidance. You will drive clarity and alignment on ambiguous, highstakes technical decisions, resolving crossteam 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 longterm health, availability, and evolution of critical ML systems, and ensuring robust testing, monitoring, and reliability practices across teams. What We Look For You have 10+ years of experience researching, designing, deploying, and operating largescale, realtime 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 endtoend 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 largescale 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 embeddingbased modeling. You possess deep expertise in neural networkbased sequence modeling, including architectures such as Transformers, recurrent, or attentionbased models, and multitask learning systems. You are comfortable designing and optimizing models that learn from sequential or temporal event data at scale. You have deep handson experience with largescale 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 longterm 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 Bachelors degree in a related field. Pay Grade REquity Grade 9 Base pay is part of a total compensation package that may include monthly stipends for health, wellness and tech spending, and benefits (including 100% subsidized medical coverage, dental and vision for you and your dependents). In addition, employees may be eligible for equity rewards offered by Affirm Holdings, Inc. (parent company). CAN base pay range per year: $206,000 $256,000 Affirm is proud to be a remotefirst company! The majority of our roles are remote and you can work almost anywhere within the country of employment. Affirmers in proximal roles have the flexibility to work remotely, but will occasionally be required to work out of their assigned office. A limited number of roles remain officebased due to the nature of their job responsibilities. Benefits Health care coverage Affirm covers all premiums for all levels of coverage for you and your dependents. Flexible Spending Wallets generous stipends for spending on Technology, Food, various Lifestyle needs, and family forming expenses. Time off competitive vacation and holiday schedules allowing you to take time off to rest and recharge. ESPP An employee stock purchase plan enabling you to buy shares of Affirm at a discount. We believe Its On Us to provide an inclusive interview experience for all, including people with disabilities. We are happy to provide reasonable accommodations to candidates in need of individualized support during the hiring process. (For U.S. positions that could be performed in Los Angeles or San Francisco) Pursuant to the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance and Los Angeles Fair Chance Initiative for Hiring Ordinance, Affirm will consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records. By clicking Submit Application, you acknowledge that you have read Affirm's Global Candidate Privacy Notice and hereby freely and unambiguously give informed consent to the collection, processing, use, and storage of your personal information as described therein. Seniority Level MidSenior level Employment Type Fulltime Job Function Engineering and Information Technology Referrals increase your chances of interviewing at Affirm by 2x. #J-18808-Ljbffr