Senior Engineering Manager, Machine Learning Platform

About the role

The Senior Engineering Manager, Machine Learning Platform at Affirm leads the team responsible for building and operating the critical infrastructure enabling every ML capability at Affirm. This role is at the intersection of distributed systems, modern AI, and platform engineering.

Responsibilities

• Own the technical strategy and roadmap for ML Platform, covering real-time and batch feature computation, model training infrastructure, and model serving at scale.
• Lead and grow a team of engineering managers, while staying hands-on with the technical direction and maintaining close partnership with ICs.
• Continuously evolve the platform to stay ahead of the frontier — anticipating where AI and ML are heading and building the infrastructure that makes those capabilities possible at Affirm before they become urgent needs. This includes large-scale training and serving of transformer-based models, GPU compute, reinforcement learning, and whatever comes next.
• Partner with ML modeling, product, and infrastructure leadership to ensure the platform accelerates Affirm's most critical ML initiatives.
• Establish engineering excellence across the organization: reliability, observability, developer experience, and operational rigor.
• Recruit, develop, and retain world-class platform engineers.

Qualifications

• 12+ years of industry experience in software and/or machine learning engineering, with significant hands-on software engineering experience, including 4+ years managing engineering managers.
• Deep expertise in building and operating large-scale ML infrastructure — feature stores, model serving systems, training pipelines, or equivalent.
• Strong understanding of data — data pipelines, data quality, and how data shapes model behavior and platform design.
• Fluency with modern ML: deep neural networks, transformer architectures, reinforcement learning, large-scale GPU training and serving.
• Strong systems thinking — comfortable reasoning from low-level infrastructure decisions to broad architectural trade-offs.
• Track record of building platforms that meaningfully accelerate the productivity and impact of ML teams.
• Experience on the applied ML modeling side is a plus — understanding how models are built makes you a better platform builder.
• Experience navigating ambiguity and leading through organizational complexity.
• Bachelor's degree in a technical field or equivalent practical experience.

Pay

Pay Grade - R
Equity Grade - 15

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