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Affirm is reinventing credit to make it more honest and friendly, offering consumers flexible buy-now-pay-later options without hidden fees or compounding interest.
Zero To One (ZT1) is Affirm's 0-to-1 innovation lab focused on turning bold ideas into validated new businesses. Operating outside standard Product and Engineering structures, ZT1 prioritizes speed, autonomy, and decisive execution. The team runs fast, hypothesis-driven experiments with the goal of prototyping quickly, generating real signals, and making explicit "kill or scale" decisions on high-impact opportunities, with AI as a core enabler across the stack.
As a Senior Software Engineer on ZT1, you will work in a small, highly empowered, AI-native team alongside product managers and cross-functional partners with direct exposure to senior leadership. You will not just build systems but help shape experiments, define technical approaches, and influence product direction. Work happens in rapid sprint cycles where ideas move quickly from concept to AI-powered prototypes and real-world testing.
Key Responsibilities:
- Own and deliver quarterly goals for your team, leading engineers through ambiguity to solve open-ended problems
- Support peers and stakeholders in the product development lifecycle by collaborating with product management, design, and analytics
- Proactively identify and lead solutions for project, process, technology, or business issues
- Support operations and availability of team artifacts by creating and monitoring metrics
- Foster a culture of quality and ownership by setting code review and design standards
- Develop talent on your team through feedback, guidance, and leading by example
Required Experience:
- 4+ years as a software engineer
- Expertise designing, developing, and launching backend systems at scale using Python, Kotlin, AWS, MySQL, and Kubernetes
- Experience shipping web apps with declarative UI frameworks like React or Vue
- Strong experience leveraging AI tools, agentic coding workflows, and automation to accelerate development and prototyping
- Ability to define technical plans for significant features with elegant, simple, and extensible designs
- Proficiency making significant changes in large codebases safely
- Strong verbal and written communication skills
- Bachelor's degree in a related field or equivalent practical experience
