Senior Manager, Category Narrative

About the Brand & Communications Team

Brand & Communications shapes how the world understands Affirm and how Affirm shows up in it. We meet people where perception forms: in culture, in the press, across our owned and paid channels, and inside the company. We aim to make our work compound over time, moving at the speed of culture while holding a high bar for craft and clarity. Our job across comms, brand, creative, and social is to make Affirm a brand people trust and are proud to choose.

About the Role

Affirm operates in a category that is still being defined. As it stands, the term "BNPL" is limiting. Credit cards have become mainstream but aren’t always the best consumer option. 

Indeed, today's ways to pay are not tomorrow's. Affirm has a vision on how to shape what's next. But, we need to bring people along as current paradigms of credit are remade.

The Senior Manager, Category Narrative drives this work. That means building a narrative that earns Affirm a different place in how the category is understood — accurate, honest, and compelling enough to resonate with consumers, and credible enough to hold up with policymakers, merchants, partners, and investors. 

This role sits at the intersection of category design and consumer truth. You'll define how Affirm talks about financial experience and consumer choice — shaping the conversations that matter, in the forums where they happen, before they get away from us. Regulatory debates, media coverage, and legal scrutiny aren't defensive lanes. They're where the category gets defined, and this role plays offense in all of them.

What You'll Do

• Own the category narrative. Define the category Affirm is building, what it is and how the space should be understood, and ensure that through-line holds whether someone encounters it in a press story, an earnings call, or a policy conversation.
• Develop and maintain messaging frameworks. Guide how Affirm talks about credit, financial experience, and consumer protection.
• Partner with Legal, Policy, and Product. Ensure the category narrative reflects how the product actually works and keeps pace as it evolves, framing new capabilities in the context of the broader credit ecosystem — and push for language that's both legally sound and narratively strong.
• Proactively build consumer clarity. Identify where confusion has eroded trust and turn those friction points into brand opportunities. 
• Keep the narrative current. Work closely with cross-functional partners to identify when the consumer financial narrative needs to evolve, and lead the process of updating it when it does.
• Stay ahead of the conversation. Identify the conversations shaping the future of payments that we want to enter and lead, and monitor the media, policy, and competitive landscape for narrative risks and opportunities before they become obvious.
• Support high-visibility moments. Bring the narrative infrastructure to earnings, policy milestones, and category-defining press, ensuring Affirm shows up with a clear, consumer-centered point of view.
• Adapt the narrative for global markets. Ensure Affirm's forward-looking narrative translates across markets with different cultural contexts around credit and lending — consistent in belief, sensitive in perspective.

What We Look For

• A category-design instinct: able to see the bigger story and make the case for why Affirm's model is genuinely different — not just differently framed
• Deep understanding of how financial products work and how to translate that into language that resonates with a mainstream consumer audience, as well as a financial one
• 12+ years in narrative strategy, communications, policy, financial services, or a related field, with a track record of shaping how a complex story is understood by multiple audiences.
• Experience navigating regulated communication environments — financial services, IR, policy, legal, or similar — without losing the narrative thread
• Strong editorial instincts: can write and pressure-test messaging that holds up under press scrutiny, regulatory review, and consumer skepticism
• Ability to distinguish between what's legally safe and what's narratively strong, and the conviction to push for both
• Comfort operating in policy conversations. Able to shape how Affirm shows up in debates about the future of credit and payments, not just respond to them. 
• Cross-functional influence: able to get alignment from stakeholders who care about very different things
• Believes that clarity and transparency are brand advantages, not compliance requirements

Pay Grade - N
Equity Grade - 10
Employees new to Affirm typically come in at the start of the pay range. Affirm focuses on providing a simple and transparent pay structure which is based on a variety of factors, including location, experience and job-related skills. Base pay is part of a total compensation package that may include equity rewards, monthly stipends for health, wellness and tech spending, and benefits (including 100% subsidized medical coverage, dental and vision for you and your dependents.)
USA base pay range (CA, WA, NY, NJ, CT) per year: $195,000 - $255,000
USA base pay range (all other U.S. states) per year: $173,000 - $233,000

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