Affirm, Inc. is reinventing credit to make it more honest and friendly, empowering consumers to buy now and pay later without any hidden fees or compounding interest. As a rapidly growing company, Affirm provides a dynamic environment for software engineers eager to drive growth while developing innovative financial solutions.

The position for Software Engineer at Affirm involves a range of responsibilities from live coding challenges to system design interviews. You will work on impactful projects that span across various domains including fraud mitigation, infrastructure reliability, and credit underwriting. Key competencies include proficiency in programming languages, a strong understanding of distributed systems, and excellent communication skills.

Considering a role with Affirm? This guide on Interview Query will provide insights into the interview process, typical technical questions, and preparation tips to help you excel. Join us to be a part of this exciting journey!

Submitting Your Application

The first step is to submit a compelling application that reflects your technical skills and interest in joining Affirm, Inc. as a Software Engineer. Whether you were contacted by an Affirm recruiter or have taken the initiative yourself, carefully review the job description and tailor your CV according to the prerequisites.

Tailoring your CV may include identifying specific keywords that the hiring manager might use to filter resumes and crafting a targeted cover letter. Furthermore, don’t forget to highlight relevant skills and mention your work experiences.

Recruiter/Hiring Manager Call Screening

If your CV happens to be among the shortlisted few, a recruiter from the Affirm Talent Acquisition Team will make contact and verify key details like your experiences and skill level. Behavioral questions may also be a part of the screening process.

In some cases, the Affirm hiring manager may be present during the screening round to answer your queries about the role and the company itself. The whole recruiter call should take about 30 minutes.

Technical Virtual Interview

Successfully navigating the recruiter round will present you with an invitation for the technical screening round. Technical screening for the Affirm Software Engineer role usually is conducted through virtual means, including video conference and screen sharing. Questions in this 1-hour long interview stage may revolve around leetcode-style coding tasks with runtime constraints.

Prepare to write a program to keep track of items in a cart or similar basic problems. Pay attention to proficiency in Python or Kotlin, depending on requirements specified in the job description.

Onsite Interview Rounds

Followed by a second recruiter call outlining the next stage, you’ll be invited to attend the onsite interview loop. Multiple interview rounds, varying with the role, will be conducted during your day(s) at the Affirm office or virtually for remote positions. Your technical prowess, including system design and programming capabilities, will be evaluated against the finalized candidates throughout these interviews.

In some cases, system design questions for imaginary experiment platforms or similar hypothetical scenarios may be assigned.

Quick Tips For Affirm Software Engineer Interviews

• Understand Affirm's Products and Culture: Familiarize yourself with Affirm’s offerings, including its mission to reinvent credit. Knowing how Affirm’s products are structured and their impact on consumers will help you frame your answers.
• Technical Preparedness: Brush up on fundamental coding skills, especially problem-solving using data structures and algorithms. Practice coding on platforms like Interview Query to enhance your preparedness.
• Engage and Clarify: Don't hesitate to ask clarifying questions during the interviews. Engaging and showing curiosity about the problem at hand can demonstrate your problem-solving approach and communication skills.

Typically, interviews at Affirm vary by role and team, but commonly Software Engineer interviews follow a fairly standardized process across these question topics.

• What are the Z and t-tests, and when should you use each? Explain what Z and t-tests are, their uses, the differences between them, and the scenarios in which one should be used over the other.

• What are the drawbacks of the given data layouts, and how would you reformat them for analysis? Given student test scores in two different layouts, identify the drawbacks of each format. Suggest formatting changes to make the data more useful for analysis and describe common problems in "messy" datasets.

• What metrics would you use to determine the value of each marketing channel? Given data on marketing channels and their costs for a company selling B2B analytics dashboards, identify the metrics you would use to evaluate the value of each marketing channel.

• How would you determine the next partner card using customer spending data? With access to customer spending data, describe the process you would use to determine the next partner card for a company.

• How would you investigate if the redesigned email campaign led to the increase in conversion rate? Given an increase in new-user to customer conversion rate after a redesigned email journey, explain how you would investigate whether the increase was due to the email campaign or other factors.

• Write a function search_list to check if a target value is in a linked list. Write a function, search_list, that returns a boolean indicating if the target value is in the linked_list or not. You receive the head of the linked list, which is a dictionary with keys value and next. If the linked list is empty, you'll receive None.

• Write a query to find users who placed less than 3 orders or ordered less than $500 worth of product. Write a query to identify the names of users who placed less than 3 orders or ordered less than $500 worth of product. Use the transactions, users, and products tables.

• Create a function digit_accumulator to sum every digit in a string representing a floating-point number. You are given a string that represents some floating-point number. Write a function, digit_accumulator, that returns the sum of every digit in the string.

• Develop a function to parse the most frequent words used in poems. You're hired by a literary newspaper to parse the most frequent words used in poems. Poems are given as a list of strings called sentences. Return a dictionary of the frequency that words are used in the poem, processed as lowercase.

• Write a function rectangle_overlap to determine if two rectangles overlap. You are given two rectangles a and b each defined by four ordered pairs denoting their corners on the x, y plane. Write a function rectangle_overlap to determine whether or not they overlap. Return True if so, and False otherwise.

• How does random forest generate the forest and why use it over logistic regression? Explain the process of how random forest generates multiple decision trees to form a forest. Discuss the advantages of using random forest over logistic regression, such as handling non-linear data and reducing overfitting.

• When would you use a bagging algorithm versus a boosting algorithm? Compare two machine learning algorithms and describe scenarios where bagging is preferred over boosting. Provide examples of the tradeoffs, such as variance reduction in bagging and bias reduction in boosting.

• How would you evaluate and compare two credit risk models for personal loans?

• Identify the type of model developed by the co-worker for loan approval.
• Describe how to measure the difference between two credit risk models over a timeframe, considering monthly installment payments.

• List the metrics to track for measuring the success of the new model, such as accuracy, precision, recall, and AUC-ROC.

• What’s the difference between Lasso and Ridge Regression? Explain the key differences between Lasso and Ridge Regression, focusing on their regularization techniques and how they handle feature selection and multicollinearity.

• What are the key differences between classification models and regression models? Describe the fundamental differences between classification and regression models, including their objectives, output types, and common use cases.

• How would you design a function to detect anomalies in univariate and bivariate datasets? If given a univariate dataset, how would you design a function to detect anomalies? What if the data is bivariate?

• What are the drawbacks of the given student test score data layouts? Assume you have data on student test scores in two layouts (dataset 1 and dataset 2). What are the drawbacks of these layouts? What formatting changes would you make for better analysis? Describe common problems in “messy” datasets.

• What is the expected churn rate in March for customers who bought the product since January 1st? You noticed that 10% of customers who bought subscriptions in January 2020 canceled before February 1st. Assuming uniform new customer acquisition and a 20% month-over-month decrease in churn, what is the expected churn rate in March for all customers who bought the product since January 1st?

• How would you explain a p-value to a non-technical person? How would you explain what a p-value is to someone who is not technical?

• What are Z and t-tests, and when should you use each? What are the Z and t-tests? What are they used for? What is the difference between them? When should you use one over the other?

What is the average salary for a Software Engineer at Affirm, Inc.?

Q: What is the interview process like for a Software Engineer at Affirm, Inc.?
The interview process at Affirm typically involves several stages: a recruiter call, a technical phone screen, and multiple rounds of interviews, including a system design interview and a final onsite day. Candidates can expect to solve leetcode-style problems, participate in system design discussions, and engage in behavioral interviews.

Q: What should I expect during the technical interview at Affirm?
Expect to solve coding problems similar to those found on Interview Query, with a focus on runtime constraints. System design questions and verbal programming tests are also common. It's important to also prepare for discussions on past projects and system design.

Q: How should I prepare for an interview at Affirm?
To prepare, practice your coding skills on Interview Query and focus on the basics. Familiarize yourself with distributed systems, architectural decisions, cloud environments like AWS, and languages such as Python and Kotlin. Review your past projects and be ready to discuss them.

Q: What is the company culture like at Affirm?
Affirm is known for its positive and collaborative company culture. Emphasis is placed on innovation, transparency, and continuous improvement. Employees are encouraged to take ownership, communicate effectively, and support each other.

Q: What are some of the benefits of working at Affirm?
Affirm offers competitive benefits including full healthcare coverage for you and your dependents, flexible spending wallets for technology, food, lifestyle needs, and family forming expenses, as well as competitive vacation and holiday schedules. They also provide an employee stock purchase plan (ESPP).

The interview experiences for the Software Engineer position at Affirm, Inc. span the full spectrum from extremely positive to negative. While some applicants appreciated the friendly, thorough, and informative engagement from their interviewers, others experienced poor communication, repetitive cancellations, and a lack of feedback post-interview. Technical assessments seemed to vary, with some finding them straightforward while others struggled with disengaged interviewers and insufficient guidance.

Despite these mixed experiences, Affirm’s commitment to reinventing credit and creating honest financial products stands out, offering roles that promise impactful work in areas like fraud detection and credit underwriting. If you're aiming to dive deep into Affirm's interview process and want to prepare thoroughly, check out our comprehensive Affirm Interview Guide. We’ve compiled essential interview questions and detailed role-specific insights, from software engineering to data analysis, to help you succeed in your application.

At Interview Query, we provide the resources to boost your interview skills, build confidence, and strategically navigate the most challenging interview questions at Affirm. Explore our company interview guides for tailored preparation strategies. Good luck with your interview!