Affirm
Pay-over-time lender using ML for underwriting and fraud decisions
Interview in a few hours? A quick sprint for Affirm
AI in interviews
A prep guide states AI use is strictly prohibited in Affirm interviews. Assume no AI assistance in any live round unless your recruiter says otherwise.
Typical interview loop
How Affirm usually runs it for applied AI and LLM engineer roles.
- Focus: Background and motivation
Recruiter call
A 30-minute conversation about your experience and interest in Affirm and the role.
- Focus: Past projects and fit
Hiring manager screen
ML candidates report a second screen with the hiring manager before the technical rounds.
- Focus: Fast, clean implementation
Technical phone screen
An hour of live coding in HackerRank.
- Focus: Applied ML and coding
Onsite coding and practical ML
Two hour-long technical sessions; ML candidates describe practical coding that mixes ML work on data with core programming.
- Focus: Scalable system design
System design
An hour-long design round, also run in HackerRank, for mid and senior engineers.
- Focus: Ownership and values
Behavioral with hiring manager
A 45-minute behavioral round on past projects, teamwork and fit with Affirm's values.
Topics to prepare for Affirm
The topics its loop weighs most, each with what interviewers check and what to study.
- Python for ML interviewsCoding
- Calling LLM APIs in Python: async, streaming, retriesCoding
- Embeddings basics: word2vec, contrastive learning, what embeddings captureML fundamentals
- Self-attention from scratchTransformers
- Retrieval for RAG: chunking, hybrid search, rerankingRAG
- Evals and error analysisEvals
- The decoder-only transformer (GPT forward pass)Transformers
- Decoding: greedy, beam, temperature, top-k/top-pInference
How it weights your plan
Selecting Affirm when you build a plan multiplies each topic’s priority score:
Official prep and resources
Public candidate write-ups
Ready to prepare for Affirm?
Get a day-by-day plan that leans toward what Affirm tests most.
Build my Affirm prep planCompany names and logos are trademarks of their owners, shown only to identify them. SAADHO isn’t affiliated with or endorsed by any of these companies.