Shaving Seconds, Adding Nines: Rearchitecting Affirm in the AI Era

Every fast-growing company accumulates technical decisions that were right at the time, but wrong later. If unaddressed, the legacy system can throttle growth.

Affirm spent years re-architecting a system that makes a new credit decision on every transaction, in real time, while the business kept growing around it. Geddes Munson, SVP Engineering at Affirm, walks through what it took: the technical sequencing, the organizational changes, and the company buy-in that made it possible. He'll also cover how AI accelerated the work, while rewriting the old textbook tradeoffs mid-project, and which of those rules still hold.

You'll leave with a way to decide when a fundamental rewrite is worth doing, how to build support for it before it’s too late, how to sequence one without stalling the roadmap, and how AI fundamentally changes the rearchitecture equation.