Security Risk Management Lead

At Affirm, we exist for the moments that matter—giving people a clear, predictable way to pay over time, with no hidden fees, no surprises, and no tradeoffs on what matters most.

At Affirm, we exist for the moments that matter—giving people a clear, predictable way to pay over time, with no hidden fees, no surprises, and no tradeoffs on what matters most.

About the team

Affirm values security as being critical to the company's continued success. Our mission is to cultivate a culture of security at Affirm, enabling the company to succeed in building honest financial products. The Security Risk Management team is evolving beyond traditional governance, risk, and compliance; we are building an engineering driven program that designs, automates, and scales the controls, workflows, and tooling that protect Affirm and our customers.

The ideal candidate will design, develop, configure, and implement solutions to complex technical and business problems across the Security Third Party Program and the broader Security Risk Management program, with a focus on the third parties Affirm takes on when it enters new markets and acquires companies. They are equally comfortable shaping policy and shipping automation using modern tooling (Python, Cursor, Claude, and other agentic coding platforms) to replace manual GRC work with scalable, code-defined workflows. They will operate as a subject matter expert, interface with business, legal, corporate development, and engineering stakeholders, and play a key role in transforming Security Risk Management from a compliance oriented function into a security engineering discipline.

What You'll Do: 

• Lead and mature Affirm's Security Third Party Program, including the design, implementation, and continuous improvement of processes, controls, and operational workflows

• Own pre-launch security due diligence for the third parties that support Affirm's entry into new international markets, such as local payment processors, banking and lending partners, credit bureaus, identity verification and KYC providers, collections agencies, and in-region hosting providers. Adapt Affirm's third party assessment standards to new markets, account for data residency, cross-border data transfer, and local regulatory requirements

• Support Finance - Strategy & Development, Legal, and Security leadership on M&A security due diligence: assess an acquisition target's security program, control environment, incident history, data handling, and third party dependencies, and turn findings into risk ratings and deal recommendations

• Lead post-close integration of an acquired company's vendor portfolio into Affirm's third party program, including inventory, risk tiering, reassessment, and tracking remediation and transition service dependencies to closure

• Design and operate workflow orchestration and integrations across systems like ticketing, GRC platforms, vendor management tools, identity providers, and cloud control planes

• Partner closely with Procurement, Legal, Engineering, IT, Compliance, Privacy, Corporate Development, international launch teams, and business stakeholders to assess and manage security risk across third party relationships

• Translate ambiguous business and security requirements into practical, scalable program solutions and decision frameworks

• Identify opportunities to automate manual processes across the program and prototype solutions yourself rather than waiting on an engineering backlog

• Drive program operational excellence by establishing repeatable processes, service-level expectations, metrics, and reporting for third party security risk management

• Evaluate third party security controls, cloud architectures (AWS/GCP), integration patterns, and risk posture, and provide clear recommendations to stakeholders and leadership

• Conduct threat modeling assessments on high risk integrations and partner with Security SMEs for deeper diligence

• Manage and prioritize a portfolio of complex security risk reviews and initiatives simultaneously, including confidential deal work on compressed timelines, balancing business enablement with risk reduction

• Partner with technical teams to implement or optimize systems and tools that support program automation and workflow orchestration

• Develop dashboards, reporting mechanisms, and program insights (SQL, BI tools, or custom tooling) that improve visibility into risk trends, bottlenecks, and program performance

• Act as a trusted advisor and SME on third party security risk management, helping stakeholders make informed, risk based decisions

• Contribute to the broader Security Risk Management strategy by identifying opportunities to scale, simplify, and strengthen security governance processes through engineering

What We Look For: 

• 5+ years of experience in Information Security, Risk Management, Engineering and/or relevant roles

• Experience performing security due diligence on M&A targets, or running third party risk assessments across multiple countries or regulatory regimes

• Hands-on experience using agentic coding tools (Cursor, Claude Code, Copilot, etc.) and a working knowledge of Python; you don't need to be a software engineer, but you should be fluent enough to read, modify, and run scripts, build automations, and ship small tools end-to-end

• Familiarity with cloud environments (AWS, GCP, or Azure): IAM, logging, common services, and the security risks/controls that apply to cloud-deployed third parties and integrations

• Excellent written and verbal communications skills

• Experience engineering solutions via Python, Claude, Cursor or other agentic coding tooling

• Experience with industry based information security & control frameworks (NIST Cybersecurity Framework, ISO 2700x, SOC 1 & 2 (SSAE 18), ISAE 3402, PCI DSS, NIST 800-53, CIS Critical Security Controls, etc.)

• BA or BS degree in Information Security, Cyber Security, Computer Science or related field or commensurate experience

• Attention to detail and experience with security practices and security tooling

• Demonstrated ability to drive projects towards completion

• Ability to understand and communicate technical issues to non-technical teams and leadership

• Sound judgment and discretion handling confidential, deal-sensitive information

• Familiarity with international data protection and third party or operational resilience requirements (e.g., GDPR, EU DORA, etc.) is a plus

• Professional certification in Information Security or Risk Management (such as CISSP, CISM, CISA, CRISC, etc.) is a plus