Went through Affirm's new grad SWE process in fall 2025. I see a lot of posts about senior roles but almost nothing about the new grad loop, so here's what I found.
Application stage: Applied through their careers page. Heard back in about 3 weeks. They do recruit at some universities but I'm not at a target school and got through via direct application. Referrals apparently help a lot here per people I've talked to.
OA: Two coding problems on HackerRank, 75 minutes. Both medium difficulty. No systems or behavioral in the OA. Standard stuff: array manipulation, one tree problem. I got through both with time to spare.
Phone screen with recruiter: Light. They confirmed I was genuinely interested, asked about timeline and visa situation (I'm a citizen so that was fast), and explained the process. She mentioned they care about "fintech curiosity" for new grads, not prior fintech experience. Have a genuine answer for why you're interested in payments or financial products.
Onsite (virtual): Two coding rounds, one system design (introductory, not the deep senior-level version), and one behavioral.
Coding: LC medium range. One of mine was a classic sliding window problem. Clean code and correct edge-case handling mattered more than blazing speed.
System design for new grads: they asked me to design a simple notification service. Not distributed systems depth. They wanted to see that I could think about components (sender, queue, receiver), data schema (what to store), and basic failure cases. No need to get into Kafka specifics at this level.
Behavioral: two questions, both STAR format. Team conflict and a time I handled unclear requirements. They are genuinely warm in the behavioral round. I was nervous and the interviewer slowed me down and said "take your time, this isn't timed."
Offer timing: about 2 weeks after onsite. New grad L3 base in SF was around $155k from what I could find; mine was comparable for remote.
One prep tip: do NOT skip the behavioral round prep for new grad roles. I almost did. The interviewers at Affirm seem to actually use the behavioral round to evaluate culture fit, not just check a box.