Senior Engineering Manager, Machine Learning Platform

Machine Learning is central to how Affirm delivers on its mission — powering decisions across underwriting, fraud, servicing, and personalization. We are seeking a Senior Manager to lead our ML Platform engineering organization, the team that builds and operates the critical infrastructure enabling every ML capability at Affirm. This is a high-impact, technically demanding role at the intersection of distributed systems, modern AI, and platform engineering. You will manage a team of engineering managers and stay deeply connected to the engineers building the platform, ensuring we continuously evolve ahead of Affirm's ML ambitions.

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. This includes large-scale training and serving of transformer-based models, GPU compute, reinforcement learning, and whatever comes next.
• 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.

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