Senior Manager, Narrative Intelligence

At Aff…

About the Brand & Communications Team

The Brand & Communications team crafts and shares affirm’s story to build trust, elevate our brand, and drive business impact. The Brand Creative team leads conceptually bold, strategically grounded work across channels—from owned content to paid media. The PR & Communications team handles internal and external messaging, ensuring our values show up in media, exec visibility, and employee storytelling. Together, we manage brand strategy, content, campaigns, media relations, and communications. We connect meaningfully with customers, partners, and the public while championing affirm’s mission.

About the Role

We want more people to understand what makes affirm different and choose us with confidence. To make that happen, we need a rigorous understanding of our audiences and a clear, measurable view of whether our story is resonating.

The Senior Manager, Narrative Intelligence will build the analytical intelligence function behind affirm’s Brand & Communications strategy. You’ll connect original research, affirm’s first-party data, brand and media measurement, behavioral signals, and external datasets to understand our audiences, identify what shapes their perceptions, and find where our story can connect more meaningfully.

You’ll turn a complex mix of data into a clear point of view that shapes affirm’s narrative and the work we put into the world. Then you’ll close the loop: defining how we measure narrative performance, determining what is and isn’t working, and identifying what we should do differently as a result.

The ambition is to make intelligence an operating system for the work—not a report that arrives after it—and set a new standard for how Brand & Communications uses data to make decisions.

What You’ll Do

• Build an evidence-based understanding of our priority audiences. Lead research and analysis into who they are, what they value, how they behave, what they believe about affirm and the category, and what could change those beliefs. Use segmentation, surveys, behavioral data, and other analytical approaches to identify the variables that matter most.
• Develop affirm’s narrative measurement framework. Define the metrics, methodologies, and baselines we use to evaluate narrative performance across audiences, channels, and time horizons. Partner with Analytics, User Research, Marketing, and other teams to strengthen attribution, experimentation, and our understanding of how narrative and reputation contribute to business outcomes.
• Build the team’s intelligence system. Create the tools, dashboards, analytical standards, and shared knowledge base that make audience intelligence and performance data easy to find, interpret, and apply. Help the broader team become more analytically confident over time.
• Own the narrative feedback loop. Build a continuous, data-informed picture of how affirm’s story is landing. Diagnose what is breaking through, what is being misunderstood or ignored, where perceptions are shifting, and what the evidence suggests we should do next.
• Connect the evidence. Bring together qualitative research, surveys, brand health, media and social intelligence, search and cultural signals, campaign performance, behavioral data, and affirm’s own customer and business data. Draw on credible external research about culture, commerce, credit, and the forces shaping how people think and behave. Find patterns, test relationships, surface contradictions, and assess the strength of the evidence.
• Turn analysis into narrative strategy. Translate findings into clear implications for affirm’s positioning, messaging, campaigns, content, and communications planning. Partner with the Head of Story to build and evolve affirm’s narrative based on what the data tells us.
• Design studies that answer consequential questions. Turn ambiguous business and communications questions into testable hypotheses and rigorous research. Choose the right mix of surveys, experiments, observational analysis, and qualitative inquiry to produce evidence the team can act on.

What We Look For

• You’re driven to understand people through data. You’re curious about the beliefs and motivations beneath human behavior and equally interested in whether the evidence supports the story being told.
• You’ve spent 12+ years in consumer analytics, audience insights, data science, measurement, strategic intelligence, quantitative research, or a related field. You’ve used analysis to shape brand, communications, marketing, product, or creative strategy.
• You’re highly fluent in quantitative research and analysis. You’re comfortable with survey design, segmentation, statistical inference, experimentation, measurement design, and large or imperfect datasets. You work directly with data, using tools such as SQL, statistical platforms, data visualization, or business intelligence tools.
• You know how to build a complete picture from different forms of evidence. You can integrate qualitative insight and quantitative analysis, account for the limits of each source, and translate concepts such as trust, relevance, reputation, and narrative resonance into thoughtful analytical frameworks.
• You turn analysis into decisions. You can take a messy body of evidence, determine which signals matter, and explain what they mean for the narrative, the work, and the choices in front of us. Your conclusions are clear, memorable, and useful to both analytical and creative audiences.
• You work well across analytical, strategic, and creative disciplines. You can collaborate credibly with data scientists and researchers, then translate the work for writers, strategists, executives, and communications leaders.
• You’d rather discover something inconvenient than confirm what everyone already believes. You test assumptions, challenge weak evidence, and follow the data—even when it complicates the current story.

Pay Grade - N
Equity Grade - 6

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 monthly stipends for health, wellness and tech spending, and benefits (including 100% subsidized medical coverage, dental and vision for you and your dependents). In addition, the employees may be eligible for equity rewards offered by affirm Holdings, Inc. (parent company).

CAN base pay range per year: $153,000-$213,000

This posting is for an existing vacancy.

Remote-first with flexibility built in

Affirm is proud to be a remote-first company. Most roles can be done from almost anywhere within the country of employment. Some positions may occasionally require in-person work at an affirm office, and a few are office-based due to the nature of the work. All new hires will be invited to attend an in-person onboarding experience.

Benefits designed for you

• Health coverage at no cost: We cover 100% of premiums for employees and their dependents.
• Spending stipends: Monthly stipends support your tech setup, and the ability to choose health and wellness options that are right for you.
• Time off to recharge: Flexible time off and generous holiday calendars help you rest when you need to.
• Own a piece of what you build: Our employee stock purchase plan (ESPP) lets you buy affirm stock at a discount.

We’re committed to providing an inclusive interview process, including accommodations for candidates with disabilities. If you need support, we’re happy to help.

For positions based in San Francisco or Los Angeles: affirm considers qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records, as required by law.