AI Solutions Engineer

Affirm; San Francisco (CA); Hybrid; USD 220,000 - 280,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health care coverage

Flexible Spending Wallets

Competitive vacation and holiday schedules

Employee stock purchase plan

Job summary

Affirm is seeking an AI Engineer to build and maintain systems enhancing the People function. You will tackle complex business issues with AI-driven solutions while collaborating with cross-functional teams.

This role provides the opportunity to shape the future of employee interactions through innovative technology in a remote-first work environment with a competitive salary and comprehensive benefits including 100% medical coverage.

Qualifications

• Experience deploying and maintaining production applications.
• Ability to understand version control and CI/CD.
• Familiarity with system architecture and design.

Responsibilities

• Build and ship AI agents, APIs, and applications.
• Turn messy business requirements into production systems.
• Work with stakeholders to scope problems and solution.

Skills

Software engineering foundation

Systems thinking and technical architecture

Builder disposition

Ability to work across the technical-business boundary

Tools

Python

Git/GitHub

CI/CD pipelines

Containerization

Job description

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.

About The Team

People Tech & Analytics (PTA) builds and owns the data, AI, and technology infrastructure for affirm's People function. The team runs like a product engineering group embedded in HR. We own the full stack: data ingestion, transformation, dashboards, AI tools, and production applications deployed on Snowflake.

About The Role

This is a hands-on engineering role. You will build, deploy, and maintain AI-powered systems that serve the People function and the broader employee base. The work is taking messy business problems (fragmented knowledge, manual processes, disconnected tools) and turning them into working software: agents, APIs, applications, and infrastructure. You will work closely with partners across the People function who own domain expertise and stakeholder relationships. Your job is to turn their rough applications and processes into production systems, and to push back when a technical constraint changes what's possible. This is not a pure backend role. You will be in the room when business problems are being scoped, and you need to understand the problem well enough to make architecture decisions on your own. You also need to take what you build and get it running in production. Hosting, security, deployment, and ongoing maintenance are all part of the job.

What You'll Do

• Build and ship AI agents, APIs, and applications on affirm's internal platform (Snowpark Container Services / Quicksilver). You own the full lifecycle: architecture, containerization, networking, secrets, CI/CD, monitoring, and fixing what breaks.
• Turn messy business requirements from People Operations stakeholders into production systems. Integrate with Workday, Notion, and case management tools so AI surfaces real answers from governed content, not model guesses.
• Navigate affirm's existing security and data governance infrastructure to get AI systems running safely on people data. RBACs, data classification, and access policies already exist, but connecting them across systems (Workday, Snowflake, case tools) is where it gets messy. You figure out what's allowed, build within those constraints, and make sure employee data stays where it's supposed to.
• Design reliability infrastructure for multi-model LLM services. Structured output validation, fallback chains, circuit breakers for external APIs, and quality controls that catch hallucination before users see it.
• Work directly with non-technical stakeholders to scope problems, make architecture decisions, and give honest assessments of what AI can and can't do. You translate in both directions.
• Contribute to the team's shared Python codebase, dbt models, and Snowflake infrastructure as part of a small, full-stack team that ships fast.
• Own what you build. When something breaks in production, you diagnose and fix it.

What We're Looking For

• Software engineering foundation. You have built, deployed, and maintained production applications. You understand version control (Git/GitHub), CI/CD pipelines, containerization, and what it takes to keep software running, not just written.
• Systems thinking and technical architecture. You understand how software systems fit together: databases, APIs, authentication, hosting, deployment pipelines. You can make architecture decisions, evaluate trade-offs, and read code well enough to know when something is wrong. The team works primarily in Python, and you should be comfortable in it, but the ability to think in systems matters more than raw coding skill.
• Builder disposition. You have created something from nothing: a system, a tool, a platform, in an environment where nobody handed you a spec. You identified the problem, designed the solution, and shipped it.
• Ability to work across the technical-business boundary. You can sit in a meeting with non-technical stakeholders, understand the real problem behind the stated request, and come back with a solution that actually addresses it. You translate in both directions: technical constraints into business language, business needs into technical requirements.

Why You'll Love This Role

• You will build AI systems that directly change how 2,000+ employees interact with the People function. Visible, measurable impact.
• Small team, high autonomy. You own what you build, from architecture through production.
• Work at the frontier of AI-powered employee experience. This is the kind of work that will define how companies operate in the next five years.
• A team that ships fast, uses AI tools as a core part of how we work, and doesn't wait for permission to build things.

Pay Information

Pay Grade - O

Equity Grade - 12

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: $220,000 - $280,000

USA base pay range (all other U.S. states) per year: $195,000 - $255,000

Please note that visa sponsorship is not available for this position.

affirm is proud to be a remote-first company! The majority of our roles are remote and you can work almost anywhere within the country of employment. affirmers in proximate roles have the flexibility to work remotely, but will occasionally be required to work out of their assigned affirm office. A limited number of roles remain office-based due to the nature of their job responsibilities.

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

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 Ordinance, affirm will consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records.

By clicking "Submit Application," you acknowledge that you have read affirm's Global Candidate Privacy Notice and hereby freely and unambiguously give informed consent to the collection, processing, use, and storage of your personal information as described therein.