Affirmer Spotlight: Allen Cheung, Senior Director of Engineering
Allen Cheung, Senior Director of Engineering, chatted with us for our next Affirmer Spotlight to discuss how his team best serves the end-consumer.
Q: Can you give us an overview of your role and what your team does here at Affirm?
A: I’m the lead for our Consumer Engineering team at Affirm. We build software that serves the consumer, on both the web and within our mobile app, for both external and internal users.
Affirm’s mission is to “deliver honest financial products that improve lives” and we play a pretty important part in creating the products to fulfill that mission! We work closely with product managers and designers to first research and understand our consumers’ pain points, brainstorm and ideate on potential solutions, and then craft a product experience that improves our customer’s lives, with further iterations informed by the analyses done by our analytics and credit teams.
Q: What does a typical day look like for you?
A: Building great consumer products is a lot of work! I spend most days talking with engineers and product managers, understanding where our products are going and how our engineering team will execute on that vision. As we’re growing so quickly, I also spend time contributing to our recruiting efforts, both to interact with candidates and to scale out our processes. I make time to hit our onsite gym every week and get home in time to have dinner with the family every day.
Q: What excites you most about where Affirm is going, and the role your team will play into it?
A: When I started at Affirm two years ago, I bought into the mission of honest financial products, and how much opportunity we had in serving that end-consumer. Two years later and that opportunity is larger than ever. Our mobile app has shown us that there’s a ton of demand from our consumers to use our core financial products with all sorts of merchants and we’re excited to extend what our app can do so it’s useful for even more consumers when they need to make a purchase.
In addition, we’re continuously experimenting with new types of financial services, like a high-yield savings account. Our core values on transparency and honesty, the relationships we have established with our merchants and consumers, and the credit data captured by our current products allows for some interesting product and feature concepts. We’ve got our work cut out to bring these ideas to reality.
Q: How would you describe your team dynamic and what do you enjoy most about working with your colleagues?
A: I’m very proud of the range that represents our engineering team — we’re a diverse cast of folks that exhibit a broad range of backgrounds, skills and personalities. And while we’re a product engineering team first, we also dive into gnarly platform issues and partner with our platform teams to make systemic improvements. I enjoy that our team is always looking to learn and improve, with a solid mindset towards growth and making themselves and Affirm better.
Q: Why should someone join the Consumer Engineering team at Affirm?
A: You should join us if any (or all) of the above resonates! If you’re excited about building great financial services; if you want to work among a team of whip-smart multi-disciplinarians who are growing themselves and encouraging you to do the same; if you’re inspired by the idea of taking on massive incumbents with a more honest and better product — then definitely check out our careers page and reach out!
