How Affirm’s Partner Engineering Team Supports the Workload of Three Companies in One
Geddes Munson, Senior Director of Partner Engineering, joined us for our next Affirmer Spotlight to discuss his experience working on a multidisciplinary team.
Q: Can you give us an overview of your role and what your team does here at Affirm?
A: I run Partner Engineering at Affirm, which is the team that supports and advocates for the thousands of developers at our merchant partners who are out there building solutions with our technology.
We’re a dynamic team because each partner engineer is a dual citizen within Affirm: part engineer and part account manager. Given Affirm’s rapid adoption across various types of companies and industries, we are looked to as e-commerce experts and should be knowledgeable on everything from big-box retail to scrappy upstart online fashion. We want our partners’ developers to be confident they will always get fast, smart and helpful guidance from Affirm. I know we are doing our job when the developers we are working with start texting with our partner engineers — it’s a great sign that a strong, organic and collaborative relationship has been forged in the fire of a big joint integration project.
Q. What led you to Affirm and joining Partner Engineering?
A: Client-facing engineering teams are common at B2B SaaS companies, which is where my career was focused prior to joining Affirm. There are lots of B2B SaaS companies that have achieved product-market fit and are in the right growth mode where they need to scale their customer-facing engineering team, but Affirm is special because we are both a B2B company and a consumer brand.
When I first started talking to Affirm I realized it is a single company doing the work of three different companies. A big chunk of what we do is B2B SaaS — signing up and supporting the merchants who want to accept Affirm as a payment method. This is the part of our world that I am most involved in. However, we are also a consumer brand that has a direct relationship with millions of customers across the country. The third part of Affirm is the bank engineering piece that accurately and quickly manages the flow of millions of dollars every day across capital markets. Most fintech companies are only doing one of those things. At first, I thought it was crazy to try and be good at all of them. However, we take on all of this at Affirm because of the scope of our vision: to truly replace existing financial products with ones that are more honest and transparent. To do this, we need to own the whole network.
I am stoked to be able to apply my experience in B2B SaaS in service of something very different — where success isn’t measured in software licenses sold but instead in the number of individual consumers benefiting from our products.
Q: What is your favorite thing about Affirm? Why? (e.g., the people, our mission, a specific perk, etc.)
A: I love my team! We have great people in Partner Engineering including sales engineers, technical account managers, channel partner engineers, developer support and merchant help. These roles all have their specialties but we all tend to have a common story. Most of us started our careers firmly in one camp or the other (though that is changing now that these kinds of roles are becoming better known and college grads have started seeking them out). Those of us who started as engineers wanted to be involved in the business side, and others who started on the business side educated themselves to become more technical. The result is a multidisciplinary team with film and computer science majors working side-by-side to solve the very real technical problems that arise when someone actually tries to use an exciting technology in a real-world scenario.
Q: What has been the most interesting project you’ve worked on since joining Affirm? What was the project’s significance for your team and/or Affirm?
A: I can’t pick just one as ‘the most’ interesting since everyone on my team has helped push huge projects to completion that are all interesting on different levels. The most recent one was our launch on a major retailer’s website. After a successful in-store rollout across all its retail locations, they were excited to launch Affirm on the website. Aside from the obvious business impact, we had to think through a host of new scenarios and work across their multiple business units and our own internal teams to address them all.
One thing I appreciated was that the retailer insisted on experiences on their site to be completely accessible (e.g., enabling access to people visiting their site with screen readers and other assistive technologies). Their ask galvanized our team to put more resources towards improving accessibility across the Affirm product. One of our partner engineers quickly became an expert on the Americans with Disabilities Act, Web Content Accessibility Guidelines and the relevant technologies required to be compliant. This engineer acted as a bridge between our engineering team and the retailer’s accessibility team to make sure using Affirm would be a great experience for all users.
One of the great things about Partner Engineering at Affirm is that our work pushes the needle for both Affirm and our partners. We help our partners provide their customers with an awesome way to pay but their feedback and insights make Affirm better, too.
Q: What does a typical day look like for you?
A: Our goals at Affirm are lofty and to support them requires great people, so I spend a good chunk of each day recruiting more great people. When I am not recruiting or in one-on-ones, I am usually working with other teams at Affirm, providing context to make sure any issues or escalations that have arisen from merchant and partner integrations are quickly resolved.
