Senior Machine Learning Engineer (Fraud)

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About the role

At Affirm, we exist for the moments that matter—giving people a clear, predictable way to pay over time, with no hidden fees, no surprises, and no tradeoffs on what matters most. On the ML Fraud team, you’ll build and improve machine learning systems that make real-time transaction decisions, protecting consumers and merchants while balancing fraud loss, customer experience, and conversion. You’ll work closely with experienced ML engineers, platform partners, and cross-functional stakeholders to take models from idea to prototype to production, and to keep them healthy with strong measurement and monitoring as fraud patterns evolve. What you’ll do - You will lead development of new fraud prediction models using a mix of approaches for tabular, graph, and behavioral data - You will build and scale feature pipelines and training datasets from proprietary and third-party signals, partnering with data and platform teams when needed. - You will prototype new modeling ideas and features, run offline experiments, and drive the best-performing approaches into production with appropriate risk controls. - You productionize models: integrate into batch and/or real-time decision systems, and improve reliability, latency, and operational robustness. - You will instrument and monitor model and data health, and help define retraining/backtesting workflows as fraud patterns evolve. - Identify and implement foundational improvements to how the team builds models. - You will collaborate across Engineering, Fraud Analytics, Product, and ML Platform to define requirements, evaluate tradeoffs, and communicate results clearly to both technical and non-technical audiences. What we look for - You have 6+ years experience researching, training, tuning and launching ML models at scale. Relevant PhD can count for up to 2 years of experience. - Track record of delivering high impact machine learning models in a low latency live setting - Strong Python skills and experience writing production-quality code. - Experience building and evaluating models for tabular classification problems (preferably gradient-boosted decision trees like LightGBM/XGBoost/CatBoost, or similar). - Experience with a deep learning framework (PyTorch preferred). - Experience working with distributed data processing or parallel compute frameworks (Spark preferred; Ray/Dask or similar). - Experience with ML lifecycle tooling for training orchestration, experimentation, and model monitoring (e.g., Kubeflow, Airflow, MLflow, or equivalent internal platforms). - Proficient in using AI-powered developer tools (e.g., Claude Code, Cursor, or similar) to accelerate iteration, debugging, and code quality as part of day-to-day development workflows. - You have mastered taking a simple problem or business scenario into a solution that interacts with multiple software components, and executing on it by writing clear, easily understood, well tested and extensible code. - You are comfortable navigating a large code base, debugging others' code, and providing feedback to other engineers through code reviews. - Your experience demonstrates that you take ownership of your growth, proactively seeking feedback from your team, your manager, and your stakeholders. - You have strong verbal and written communication skills that support effective collaboration with our global engineering team. Pay Grade - N Equity Grade - 6 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 monthly stipends for health, wellness and tech spending, and benefi

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