Senior Manager, Software Engineering (ML Platform)

About This RoleAI processing…

Key Responsibilities

• 1
  Own the technical strategy and roadmap for ML Platform, covering real-time and batch feature computation, model training infrastructure, and model serving at scale.
• 2
  Lead and grow a team of engineering managers, while staying hands-on with the technical direction and maintaining close partnership with ICs.
• 3
  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.
• 4
  Partner with ML modeling, product, and infrastructure leadership to ensure the platform accelerates Affirm's most critical ML initiatives.
• 5
  Establish engineering excellence across the organization: reliability, observability, developer experience, and operational rigor.
• 6
  Recruit, develop, and retain world-class platform engineers.

Requirements

• 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.

Perks & Benefits