Senior Manager of Software Engineering

About the role

Join Affirm as a Senior Manager of Software Engineering, where you will lead the ML Platform engineering organization. This high-impact role requires a strong background in distributed systems, modern AI, and platform engineering. You will own the technical strategy and roadmap for the ML Platform, lead and grow a team of engineering managers, and continuously evolve the platform to stay ahead of AI and ML advancements. You will also partner with ML modeling, product, and infrastructure leadership to accelerate Affirm's critical ML initiatives. Key missions: 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. Profile: - Track record of building platforms that meaningfully accelerate the productivity and impact of ML teams - Strong understanding of data — data pipelines, data quality, and how data shapes model behavior and platform design - Bachelor's degree in a technical field or equivalent practical experience - 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 - Experience on the applied ML modeling side is a plus — understanding how models are built makes you a better platform builder - 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 - Experience navigating ambiguity and leading through organizational complexity