Senior Staff Machine Learning Engineer, (ML Underwriting)

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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. 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. 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.

What You’ll Do

• 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.

What We Look For

Pay Grade - R

Equity Grade - 9

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 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, the 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 remote‑first company! The majority of our roles are remote and you can work almost anywhere within the country of employment. affirms 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.

Benefits

We believe it’s 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

Mid‑Senior level

Employment type

Full‑time

Job function

Engineering and Information Technology

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