Top Affirm Interview Questions You Should Practice

Affirm is changing how we think about credit to make it more approachable and transparent. To accomplish this, it is constantly working to improve the software. This is where you come into play. All you have to do is pass the Affirm interview questions, and you'll be a part of the team.

To help you prepare for your interview, we've compiled a list of some of the most frequently asked Affirm interview questions. These will provide you with an idea of what to expect during the interview.

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In this article, we’ll be covering:

• An Overview of Affirm
• Role and Responsibilities of an Affirm Software Engineer
• Affirm Interview Questions for Software Engineers
• Affirm Behavioral Interview Questions
• FAQs on Affirm Interview Questions

An Overview of Affirm

Founded by PayPal founder Max Levchin, Affirm is a financial technology company. It’s headquartered in San Francisco, US. The company lets its customers get microloans at the point of sale with participating vendors.

The primary purpose is to provide them with a faster, more transparent, and inclusive alternative to credit cards. Its mission is to deliver honest financial services that elevate the customers' quality of life.

So when you start prepping for the Affirm interview questions, make sure to read up on its mission statement and core values since this helps answer behavioral questions.

Role and Responsibilities of an Affirm Software Engineer

Affirm hires software engineers to make its products and features function better to improve the user experience. As the company has been witnessing massive growth in the past couple of years across thousands of merchants in-store and online, they need quality engineers to maintain this pace.

As a software engineer at Affirm, your responsibilities include:

• Identifying and planning projects with the product and engineering managers based on established team goals and resources.
• Working on drafting detailed project definition, designing, cross-functional alignment, estimation, and maintenance.
• Continuously develop effective and simple designs and write good quality code that is easy to understand and can be used by other team members.
• Maintaining relationships with members of different departments and the engineering department to design, implement, and support projects.
• Actively participate and voice your opinions to make the team and workplace more inclusive for everyone.

These are the responsibilities of a new hire and a mid-level position. If you are hired as a senior software engineer at Affirm, your responsibilities will grow even more and include more managerial duties.

Affirm Interview Questions for Software Engineers

Technical questions for software engineers at most companies consist of questions on data structures, algorithms, system design, and coding. To help you get started, here are some Affirm interview questions.

1. Given an input list of names, for each name, find the shortest substring that only appears in that name.
2. Implement a card game.
3. How would you implement a data processing function in Python?
4. How to implement a decision tree algorithm?
5. If you’re given two words and a dictionary, return the shortest path between two words.
6. Given: An array.
   Find: The number of subarrays whose product is less than a given value ‘k.’
7. Implement a persistent stack.
8. Recursive and iterative way to flatten a list, given [1, [2,3], [[[4]]]], return [1,2,3,4].
9. If you’re given two matrices, write the function that'll determine whether the two are identical or not.
10. Given: a string S of integers [1, 8].
    Find: The length of the smallest non-prime subsequence of the string S. Also, print "-1" if all the subsequences are prime.

Recommended Reading: How to Crack a Coding Interview With 2 Months of Prep

Affirm Behavioral Interview Questions

Some Affirm interview questions you can expect in the behavioral rounds are:

1. In what ways are you qualified to work at Affirm?
2. What is a project that you’re proud of?
3. Describe yourself briefly and also explain why you’re interested in this position.
4. To date, what, according to you, has been your most innovative idea?
5. How do you use varying styles of communication to be effective?
6. Why do you want to work at Affirm?
7. If a team member of yours is often late to meetings, what will you do?
8. Tell me about a time when you showed ownership.
9. Can you walk me through the latest project you’ve worked on?
10. How do you go about resolving issues with team members?

We tend to miss out on preparing for the behavioral rounds when preparing for interviews. However, these are the rounds where the interviewers determine whether you’re a cultural fit for the role or not. So don’t miss out on preparing for the behavioral part of Affirm interview questions.

This is especially true for more senior positions like tech leads and engineering managers.

If you want some pointers on how to crack an engineering manager interview, read What Should You Expect From an Engineering Manager Interview?

FAQs on Affirm Interview Questions

Q1. Is it hard to get a job at Affirm?

Based on their interview experience, users have given a difficulty rating of 3 out of 5 to Affirm (according to glassdoor.com). Further, the Affirm interview questions for software engineers range from easy to medium on the difficulty scale. So when prepping for the interview process, prepare accordingly.

Q2. What is it like to work at Affirm?

Affirm is a startup doing well consistently and expanding over the years. If you join, you’ll get a lot of opportunities to learn and grow with the company as it expands. It has a 4.3 out of 5 based rating on glassdoor.com on the reviews by current and former employees.

Q3. How long does Affirm take to reply after an interview?

You can expect the hiring team or HR to contact you within two weeks of your interview. However, this is just a tentative time and can vary. For more clarity, you can just ask the interviewer towards the end of your interview.

Q4. What is the Affirm senior software engineer salary?

The average Affirm senior software engineer salary is $204,686 per year.

Q5. What sort of Affirm interview questions can a software engineer expect?

As a software engineer, some topics you can expect Affirm interview questions are data structures, algorithms, system design, and coding. Don’t forget to prepare some behavioral questions too.

Want to Crack the Affirm Interview Process?

If you’re looking for guidance when preparing for Affirm interview questions for a software engineer, sign up for our free webinar.

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