Senior Engineering Manager, Machine Learning Platform
Affirm · Houston, TX · 2 wk ago
RemoteRemoteEngineering$265k–$325k/yrFull-time
What You'll Do
- 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.
- 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.
What We Look For
- 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.