Senior Staff Machine Learning Engineer, (Machine Learning)

About the role

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.

Responsibilities

• 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.

Requirements

• 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.

Qualifications

• You have a Bachelor’s degree in a related field or equivalent practical experience.

Skills

• Strong verbal and written communication skills that support effective collaboration across our global engineering organization.

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

Pay

Pay Grade - R
Equity Grade - 15

Employees new to Affirm typically come in at the start of the pay range. Affirm focuses on providing a simple and transparent pay structure which is based on a variety of factors, including location, experience and job-related skills.

Base pay is part of a total compensation package that may include equity rewards, monthly stipends for health, wellness and tech spending, and benefits (including 100% subsidized medical coverage, dental and vision for you and your dependents.)

USA base pay range (CA, WA, NY, NJ, CT) per year: $265,000 - $325,000
USA base pay range (all other U.S. states) per year: $236,000 - $296,000

Schedule

The majority of our roles are remote. Affirmers in proximal roles have the flexibility to work remotely, but will occasionally be required to work out of their assigned Affirm office. A limited number of roles remain office-based due to the nature of their job responsibilities.

Company

Affirm is a remote-first 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 Affirm office. A limited number of roles remain office-based due to the nature of their job responsibilities.

Our Commitment to Inclusion

We’re extremely proud to offer competitive benefits that are anchored to our core value of people come first. Some key highlights of our benefits package include:

• 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

Equal Opportunity Employer

We are committed to providing equal employment opportunity for all individuals regardless of race, color, religion, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, age, disability, veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by law. We do not discriminate in hiring, hiring practices, or any aspect of the employment relationship, including recruitment, advertising, compensation, promotions, termination, and all other terms and conditions of employment.