Build AI-native 0-to-1 prototypes on Affirm's innovation lab team

Affirm's Zero To One (ZT1) lab is hiring a Senior Full Stack Engineer to prototype and validate new business ideas outside the standard product/engineering structure. The role expects hands-on ownership of quarterly team goals, AI-assisted/agentic development workflows, and backend systems in Python, Kotlin, AWS, MySQL, and Kubernetes alongside React/Vue frontends. Practice articulating how you move an idea from hypothesis to a working, testable AI-powered prototype fast.

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What this interview tests

Zero-to-one prototyping and hypothesis-driven experimentation
AI-assisted/agentic development workflows for speed
Backend system design (Python, Kotlin, AWS, MySQL, Kubernetes)
Frontend delivery with React/Vue
Ownership through ambiguity, code quality, and cross-functional collaboration

Common question themes

Tell me about owning a quarterly goal from ambiguous problem to shipped prototype.

Describe a concrete case where agentic AI tooling or automation changed how you built or prototyped something.

Walk through a backend system or API you designed for scale and extensibility.

How do you safely make significant changes in a large, unfamiliar codebase?

Tell me about a time you shaped product direction by surfacing technical trade-offs during ideation.

How do you balance shipping speed with engineering judgment when the team wants a fast signal?

How candidates describe it

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