Affirm

Affirm runs three named early-career engineering programs published on its university recruiting page:

• Summer internships: 12 to 16 weeks, hosted in the San Francisco office, with three required in-office days per week (Tuesday through Thursday). USA hourly base pay is $55. Past intern projects the firm publishes include batch pipelines for the in-store Walmart product and a bank-portal aggregate tool that cut accounting run-time by over 97%.
• Early Career Engineering Program (new-grad): a hybrid office program with offices in New York, Chicago, London, San Francisco, or Warsaw. The first year requires Tuesday-through-Thursday in office, and each early-career engineer is paired with an engineering mentor who meets with them weekly. After year one, the engineer can stay hybrid, go fully remote, or work in an office.
• A Software Engineering Apprentice (Full-Stack) track: six months, remote US, open to applicants 18+ with no college degree requirement, structured as one-on-one technical mentorship plus a curriculum through Affirm's stack.

The firm markets itself as remote-first for most roles, so an early-career applicant is accepting a more office-bound first year than Affirm's senior engineers. Choosing among the three programs is partly choosing the office: the new-grad program offers five city options, the summer intern program runs only out of San Francisco, and the apprenticeship is the only US-remote early-career route.

By contrast, Affirm's full-time engineering postings ask the standard "do you now or in the future require sponsorship for employment visa status" question without an upfront exclusion. For an international candidate without independent US work authorization, the intern and apprentice routes are effectively closed at the application stage, and the realistic Affirm path is the full-time engineering pipeline after graduation rather than the summer or apprenticeship intake.

The structure is engineering-only at the program level – no rotational banking-style or analyst program – and the intern projects the firm publishes (in-store Walmart batch pipelines, a bank-portal aggregate tool, an iOS merchant browser rebuild) sit on production systems shipped to customers rather than scoped side-projects. For a candidate weighing this alongside fully-remote fintech internships, the trade-off is concrete: shipped work in named cities in exchange for a more office-bound first year than the firm's senior engineers.