Affirm Internship & New-Grad Interview: What to Expect

The Affirm software engineer internship and new-grad loop is a lighter version of the full-time process, and it leans almost entirely on coding. The shape is familiar: a recruiter reaches out or you apply, then one or two live-coding phone screens on a shared editor like HackerRank or CoderPad, then a virtual onsite. What the entry loop drops is the weight up top. A senior candidate faces two system design rounds. An intern or new grad sees a lighter onsite, closer to three technical rounds and one behavioral. System design sits light, or drops out. Coding is the round that decides you.

That makes the entry loop, in one sense, simpler to prepare for than a senior one. The range you are asked to prove is narrower. You do not need a system design script. You need to recognize a small set of medium coding problems, dressed in Affirm's world of merchants and loans, and turn each into clean, running code. What comes next: how the entry loop differs from the full process, where you land on the ladder, and exactly what to drill.

The intern and new-grad loop

Pin the shape down before you plan around it. A few facts anchor the entry-level version of the loop.

• Phone screens: 1 to 2. Live coding on a shared editor such as HackerRank or CoderPad. You write real code in the language of your choice and run it, then talk through time and space. This is the gate that gets you to the onsite.
• Onsite rounds: ~3 + 1. A lighter virtual onsite than the senior loop: roughly three technical rounds and one behavioral conversation. The exact mix flexes, so treat any single recipe as a guide.
• System design: Light or absent. The design rounds that dominate a senior loop sit light or drop out entirely at the entry level. Your hours are better spent on coding patterns than on architecture at this stage.
• The signature: Coding-first. Coding is nearly the whole loop for interns and new grads. The problems are mediums reskinned in Affirm's own domain, not hard algorithm puzzles.

Two side doors are worth naming so you do not confuse them with the standard entry path. Affirm runs an apprenticeship track with its own coding assessment, aimed at career-changers rather than new grads, and a machine learning engineer track with its own flavor of questions. Both sit outside this software engineering guide, which stays trained on the standard intern and new-grad loop above.

Where new grads land: L4

Affirm's engineering ladder starts at a number that trips people up. There is no L1, L2, or L3 on the individual-contributor track. The first rung is L4, and L4 is the entry level, the one a new grad lands on. Read L4 with a Google or Amazon frame in mind and you will misjudge it, since that same number reads as mid-level almost everywhere else. So anchor to Affirm's own ladder. On crowdsourced levels.fyi medians, a new-grad L4 total sits near $203K in the United States. Most of it is base, with a real restricted-stock grant on top, since Affirm trades publicly on the Nasdaq as AFRM. The full ladder and the stock-heavy shape of the offer live in leveling and how decisions are made and negotiating an Affirm offer.

The Affirm angle

Put nearly all of your prep on coding, and drill the two problems Affirm reskins. At the entry level the loop is coding almost end to end, so this is where the hours pay. Affirm reaches for a small, recognizable set of medium problems and dresses each in its own business. The two to make automatic: a weighted-random hashmap you can insert, delete, and sample from in constant time, and a co-occurrence recommendation that finds which merchant is most often bought alongside another. A third, a rolling window that sums the last hour of loan volume, rounds it out. Those get worked end to end in Affirm coding: what to expect and the lessons under it. One habit ties the round together and quietly decides it: clarify the deliberately vague prompt out loud before you write, then run your code on real inputs. If your base data structures feel shaky, the free Foundations course drills each one from the ground up.

Applying, timing, and what to expect

Most entry candidates get in one of two ways: a recruiter reaches out, or you apply directly to a posted role, and a referral helps either path. Affirm posts a limited number of entry seats and hires for specific teams in areas like payments and risk, so apply as soon as a role opens rather than late in the cycle. Once the loop starts it tends to move quickly. Candidates report the whole process wrapping within about two weeks, and Affirm is known to send fast rejects, sometimes within hours of a working solution. Read a quick turnaround as how Affirm operates, not as a verdict on your worth, and keep any competing offers and their deadlines live while you wait.

Common questions