Affirm · 1 week ago
Senior Staff Machine Learning Engineer, (ML Underwriting)
San Diego, CA
Full-time
Hybrid
Senior Level, Lead/Staff
$260K/yr - $310K/yr
10+ years expAffirm is reinventing credit to make it more honest and friendly, and they are seeking a Senior Staff Machine Learning Engineer to join their innovative ML team. In this role, you will shape the future of machine learning at Affirm, partner with various leaders to design and implement advanced modeling approaches, and mentor senior engineers while influencing the architectural direction of the team.
Financial ServicesFinTechLendingPayments
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
Qualification
Required
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
Experience leading end-to-end ML system design, from data architecture and feature pipelines to model training, evaluation, and production deployment. Use distributed frameworks such as Spark, Ray, or similar large-scale data processing systems
Proficient in Python and ML frameworks, including PyTorch and XGBoost. Experienced with ML tooling for training orchestration, experimentation, and model monitoring, such as Kubeflow, MLflow, or equivalent internal platforms
Strong understanding of representation learning and embedding-based modeling. Possess deep expertise in neural network-based sequence modeling, including architectures such as Transformers, recurrent, or attention-based models, and multi-task learning systems. Comfortable designing and optimizing models that learn from sequential or temporal event data at scale
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
Provide strong technical leadership: defining long-term strategy, guiding research direction, and aligning work across teams. Recognized as a trusted expert who can drive clarity and execution even in ambiguous problem spaces
Demonstrate exceptional judgment, collaboration, and communication skills, enabling effective technical discussions with engineers, researchers, and executives. Mentor senior engineers, foster technical excellence, and contribute to a culture of continuous learning
Strong verbal and written communication skills that support effective collaboration across our global engineering organization
Equivalent practical experience or a Bachelor's degree in a related field
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
Company
Affirm
Affirm is a financial technology services company that offers installment loans to consumers at the point of sale.
1001-5000 employees
H1B Sponsorship
Affirm has a track record of offering H1B sponsorships. Please note that this does not
guarantee sponsorship for this specific role. Below presents additional info for your
reference. (Data Powered by US Department of Labor)
Distribution of Different Job Fields Receiving Sponsorship
Represents job field similar to this job
Trends of Total Sponsorships
2025 (104)
2024 (96)
2023 (133)
2022 (179)
2021 (132)
2020 (57)
Funding
Current Stage
Public CompanyTotal Funding
$7.57BKey Investors
New York Life InsuranceSixth StreetPGIM Fixed Income
2025-10-31Post Ipo Debt· $750M
2024-12-17Post Ipo Debt· $800M
2024-12-13Post Ipo Debt· $4B
Leadership Team
Max Levchin
Founder & CEO
Robert O'Hare
Chief Financial Officer
Recent News
Crowdfund Insider
2025-12-25
Company data provided by crunchbase