Underwriting ML Engineer II — Real-Time Risk at Scale (Remote)

Affirm, Inc.; United States; Remote; USD 95,000 - 131,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health coverage

Flexible Spending Wallets

Time off

Employee stock purchase plan

Job summary

Affirm, Inc. is seeking an ambitious ML Engineer on the Underwriting team to build real-time decisioning systems for credit risk.

You will develop models, scale feature pipelines, and bring ideas from concept to production with strong monitoring and governance. You will collaborate with Engineering, Risk Analytics, Product, and ML Platform to define requirements, compare tradeoffs, and clearly communicate results to technical and non-technical audiences.

Qualifications

• 2+ years of experience as ML engineer or a PhD in a relevant field.
• Strong Python skills and production-quality code.
• Experience building/evaluating models for classification (GBDTs like LightGBM/XGBoost/CatBoost).
• Experience with a deep learning framework (PyTorch).
• Experience with distributed data processing (Spark).
• Experience with ML lifecycle tooling (Kubeflow, Airflow, MLflow).
• Proficient in AI-powered developer tools (Claude Code, Cursor).
• Ability to write clear, tested, extensible code across components.
• Strong verbal and written communication for global teams.
• Bachelor’s degree or equivalent practical experience.

Responsibilities

• Develop and iterate underwriting prediction models for tabular/sequential data.
• Build scalable feature pipelines and datasets from proprietary and third-party signals.
• Prototype modeling ideas, run offline experiments, productionize top approaches with risk controls.
• Productionize models into batch/real-time decision systems with reliability and latency improvements.
• Instrument and monitor model and data health; define retraining and backtesting workflows.
• Collaborate with Engineering, Risk Analytics, Product, and ML Platform to define requirements and communicate results.

Skills

Python

Production code

Model monitoring

Distributed data processing

PyTorch

Spark

ML lifecycle tooling

Code reviews

Communication

Ownership

Education

Bachelor’s degree or PhD in related field

Tools

LightGBM

XGBoost

CatBoost

Kubeflow

Airflow

MLflow

Claude Code

Cursor

Job description

Affirm, Inc. is seeking an ambitious ML Engineer on the Underwriting team to build real-time decisioning systems for credit risk.

You will develop models, scale feature pipelines, and bring ideas from concept to production with strong monitoring and governance. You will collaborate with Engineering, Risk Analytics, Product, and ML Platform to define requirements, compare tradeoffs, and clearly communicate results to technical and non-technical audiences.