Senior Staff Machine Learning Engineer,

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. As a Senior Staff Machine Learning Engineer, you will play a pivotal role in our innovative ML team, partnering 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 mentor senior engineers, bring clarity to complex, ambiguous problems and contribute to a cohesive long‑term ML strategy. Responsibilities Define and drive a multi‑year, multi‑team technical strategy for machine learning across the company, ensuring alignment with company‑wide priorities and influencing partner roadmaps. Lead the design, implementation and scaling of advanced ML systems, setting architectural direction for complex, cross‑functional initiatives while keeping systems reliable, extensible and ready for increasingly sophisticated workloads. Partner deeply with ML Platform, product, engineering and risk leadership to shape long‑term modeling capabilities, identify new opportunities for ML impact and guide infrastructure evolution for next‑generation methods. 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. 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. 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. Qualifications 10+ years researching, designing, deploying and operating large‑scale, real‑time machine learning systems, with a proven record of driving technical innovation and measurable business impact. Relevant PhD may count for up to 2 years of experience. Experience leading end‑to‑end ML system design, from data architecture and feature pipelines to model training, evaluation and production deployment. Proficiency in Python and ML frameworks such as PyTorch and XGBoost; experience with ML tooling for training orchestration, experimentation and monitoring (e.g., Kubeflow, MLflow). Strong understanding of representation learning and embedding‑based modeling; deep expertise in neural‑network based sequence modelling, Transformers, recurrent or attention‑based models and multi‑task learning systems. Deep hands‑on experience with large‑scale distributed ML infrastructure, including streaming or batch ingestion, feature stores, feature engineering, training pipelines, model serving, inference infrastructure and automated retraining. Strong technical leadership: defining long‑term strategy, guiding research direction and aligning work across teams. Exceptional judgment, collaboration and communication skills; ability to lead technical discussions with engineers, researchers and executives. Excellent verbal and written communication skills to collaborate across a global engineering organization. Equivalent practical experience or Bachelor’s degree in a related field. Pay Grade: R Equity Grade: 9 Base pay range: $206,000 – $256,000 per year. Employees new to Affim typically start at the lower end of the range and may receive additional monthly stipends for health, wellness and tech spending, as well as equity rewards. Affirm is proud to be a remote‑first company. The majority of roles are remote and can be worked from any location within the country of employment. Occasional on‑site visits may be required. Benefits Health care coverage—Affirm covers all premiums for all levels of coverage for you and your dependents. Flexible Spending Wallets—generous stipends for technology, food, lifestyle and family‑forming expenses. Time off—competitive vacation and holiday schedules. ESPP—employee stock purchase plan that allows you to buy shares of Affim at a discount. 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, Affim will consider qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records. By clicking “Submit Application,” you acknowledge that you have read Affim’s Global Candidate Privacy Notice and hereby give informed consent to the collection, processing, use and storage of your personal information as described therein. #J-18808-Ljbffr