Staff Data and AI Engineer, Finance

We believe that the way people interact with their finances will drastically improve in the next few years. We’re dedicated to empowering this transformation by building the tools and experiences that thousands of developers use to create their own products. Plaid powers the tools millions of people rely on to live a healthier financial life. We work with thousands of companies like Venmo, SoFi, several of the Fortune 500, and many of the largest banks to make it easy for people to connect their financial accounts to the apps and services they want to use. Plaid’s network covers 12,000 financial institutions across the US, Canada, UK and Europe. Founded in 2013, the company is headquartered in San Francisco with offices in New York, Washington D.C., London and Amsterdam. AI and intelligent systems are driving the fifth paradigm shift, following previous technological revolutions like mainframes, personal computers, the internet, and mobile devices. We believe, in the foreseeable future, AI will revolutionize the FinTech industry - from how consumers understand and manage their finances, to how developers build applications and how all companies operate. The fintech industry landscape will undergo a fundamental reshape.    Plaid in the FinTech AI Ecosystem Plaid is uniquely positioned to become the financial data and insights backbone for AI applications and platforms in this evolving ecosystem.    We believe consumers should be able to understand and manage their financial life through conversational AI interfaces using natural language. We believe consumers should have peace of mind with a trustworthy consent and authorization manager when agents shop for them. We believe identity verification and financial fraud prevention in AI-powered products should feel seamless and embedded for the end users. The list goes on. The most important AI companies, major fintechs, and customer agent platforms are actively trying to integrate Plaid into AI-powered products and solutions they build.    Plaid’s AI-powered Experiences for Customers The explosive growth in model intelligence and increasing relevance for enterprise tasks offer a unique opportunity for Plaid to rethink from the ground up how we operate and interact with our customers for the most optimal experience.    Our early experiments in building AI agents for customer experience are paying off with huge business value. For example, our homegrown AI-powered customer support agents resolve a significant proportion of customer questions and issues within seconds, which would otherwise have required humans hours to work on.  This is just the beginning and there is so much more we could do.   The AI Applications Team You will have the opportunity to join as one of the founding members of this newly formed team that is dedicated to consolidating and rapidly scaling our successful bets so far, and grow with the team in our quest to accelerate Plaid’s transformation into an AI-first company.   In this role you will lead projects that enable and scale our business with our largest AI customers and partners, starting with personal finance use cases and expanding into many others; examples include: * Develop and evolve the preferred integration pattern for Plaid with AI providers - from API adaptations to building the official Plaid MCP Servers, and beyond * Redefine how Plaid’s consumer link experience embed into conversational interfaces in the most seamless way * Architect the trust layer for the future of agentic commerce that will become the industry standard Additionally you will be expected to scale and extend our existing successful bets on AI-powered customer experience; examples include: * Make the next step-function improvement in our homegrown customer support agent - land our multi-turn and multi-agent system that powers a truly delightful experience for our customers; define how to scalably run offline evaluation for complex multi-turn open-ended tasks; research and prototype how Human-In-The-Loop - Reinforcement Learning (RLHF) can power an insights flywheel; pioneer the architecture for customer-specific long-term memory, etc. * Extend our agentic system to support other critical parts of the customer journey, starting with areas with the highest ROI - top-of-funnel product recommendation, customer onboarding and risk diligence, customer activation and assistance for faster productionization, as well as upselling and cross-selling of Plaid products   You will have a front row seat to all the latest industry developments. Over time, with the skills and experience you develop and hone on this team, you can become an influential voice in defining where AI <> Fintech will be heading longer term. Responsibilities * Design, develop, and maintain scalable backend services and APIs, as well as intuitive, high-quality frontend applications that bring those systems to life. * Work with other AI engineers, software engineers and machine learning engineers to architect, design and implement GenAI-powered products and features * Collaborate across functions to understand user needs, propose and implement AI-powered solutions where they’re expected to have the highest impact * Design and execute rapid experiments to push the boundaries on potential business impact from emerging AI capabilities, with a focus on minimal viable testing approaches * Balance creative exploration of possibilities with rigorous evaluation of technical feasibility, product potential and business impact Requirements * Experience building backend services and working with microservices or service-oriented architectures * Hands-on experience working with LLMs to build products and shipping them to product with iterating with real user feedback - including but not limited to: * Prompt engineering * Fine-tuning * Retrieval augmented generation (RAG) * Semantic search - vector database and embedding models * Agent orchestration framework * Evaluation and monitoring framework of open-ended tasks * Streaming and SSE * Common UX and design patterns for GenAI-powered products * Strong debugging and monitoring experience for production systems * Ability to deeply understand customer and user needs through user research and rapid experimentation - be your own technical PM * Ability to balance divergent thinking (exploring possibilities) with convergent thinking (evaluating feasibility), which is critical for driving 0 ->1 projects * Extremely curious and passionate about working in GenAI applications space Nice-to-Haves * Experience training and/or serving ML models in production, or fine-tuning LLMs for domain-specific use cases * Comfortable operating in privacy/PII-sensitive environments and applying compliance mitigations * Working knowledge of HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and modern frontend frameworks or libraries, with comfort building user-facing experiences Our mission at Plaid is to unlock financial freedom for everyone. To support that mission, we seek to build a diverse team of driven individuals who care deeply about making the financial ecosystem more equitable. We recognize that strong qualifications can come from both prior work experiences and lived experiences. We encourage you to apply to a role even if your experience doesn't fully match the job description. We are always looking for team members that will bring something unique to Plaid! Plaid is proud to be an equal opportunity employer and values diversity at our company. We do not discriminate based on race, color, national origin, ethnicity, religion or religious belief, sex (including pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical conditions), sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, gender expression, transgender status, sexual stereotypes, age, military or veteran status, disability, or other applicable legally protected characteristics. We also consider qualified applicants with criminal histories, consistent with applicable federal, state, and local laws. Plaid is committed to providing reasonable accommodations for candidates with disabilities in our recruiting process. If you need any assistance with your application or interviews due to a disability, please let us know at accommodations@plaid.com. Please review our Candidate Privacy Notice here. Additional compensation in the form(s) of equity and/or commission are dependent on the position offered. Plaid provides a comprehensive benefit plan, including medical, dental, vision, and 401(k). Pay is based on factors such as (but not limited to) scope and responsibilities of the position, candidate's work experience and skillset, and location. Pay and benefits are subject to change at any time, consistent with the terms of any applicable compensation or benefit plans.

Employee Applicant Privacy Notice Who we are: Shape a brighter financial future with us. Together with our members, we’re changing the way people think about and interact with personal finance. We’re a next-generation financial services company and national bank using innovative, mobile-first technology to help our millions of members reach their goals. The industry is going through an unprecedented transformation, and we’re at the forefront. We’re proud to come to work every day knowing that what we do has a direct impact on people’s lives, with our core values guiding us every step of the way. Join us to invest in yourself, your career, and the financial world. The role: SoFi’s Senior Staff AI Engineer is a hands-on AI engineering role in SoFi’s growing independent risk organization. This is a critical, senior role responsible for setting the technical direction, driving execution, and ensuring the successful delivery of our most complex, production-level AI initiatives. This role will be instrumental in conceptualizing, prototyping and implementing best-in-class AI-based solutions to meet risk management and compliance requirements. This hands-on role will work closely with the Director of Risk Analytics, and will leverage your deep expertise to solve our hardest problems, mentor the next generation of engineers, and directly connect technical innovation to major business success. This is a crucial role for the independent risk function as we execute our mission to help more members get their money right. What you’ll do:  * Architecture and Strategy: Define the long-term technical architecture and strategy for our next-generation AI platform, particularly focusing on robust, scalable agentic frameworks and LLM deployment patterns. * Advanced LLM Orchestration: Architect and standardize the use of graph-based LLM orchestration, leveraging expert-level mastery of LangGraph to solve highly complex, multi-stage reasoning problems at scale. * Distributed Agent Memory & State: Develop robust, persistent infrastructure for agentic state management, ensuring that long-running agent workflows maintain context and reliability across distributed nodes and regional failovers * Deep Model Optimization: Pioneer and institutionalize advanced parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) and compression techniques to maximize model performance and minimize operational costs across the organization. * Model Serving Infrastructure: Support the development of a unified model serving platform designed to host internally fine-tuned and custom-trained models to ensure high-throughput, low-latency inference across diverse hardware footprints. * Operational Excellence: Define and enforce high standards for AI operationalization, requiring mastery in designing and deploying comprehensive AI observability solutions and advanced tracing/testing frameworks that guarantee production quality, compliance, and reliability. * Mentorship: Mentor senior and junior AI Engineers, elevating the overall engineering quality * Cross Functional Collaboration: Coordinate with cross-functional teams to distill specific requirements, project roadmaps, and ensure accurate and on-time project deliveries * AI Innovation: Stay up-to-date with the latest trends and advancements in GenAI, LLMs, and NLP, evaluating and experimenting with new techniques and tools to push the boundaries of AI innovation in the banking sector. What you’ll need: * Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Data Science, AI, Machine Learning, or a related field. PhD is a plus. * 8+ years software development experience, with 3+ years of hands-on experience in developing and successfully deploying production-level AI applications that have been used by real customers or internal stakeholders. * Expert-level experience with LangGraph to model and orchestrate complex, stateful multi-step reasoning and control flow in LLM applications. * Expert-level proficiency in developing sophisticated agentic solutions, with a portfolio demonstrating advanced use of planning, memory management, tool integration, and control flow. * Deep understanding of Large Language Model (LLM) architectures, prompt engineering, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), and advanced text generation techniques. * Proven experience implementing parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) techniques (e.g., LoRA) to customize and optimize pre-trained models for specific tasks with minimal computational overhead. * Deep expertise in building or extending inference engines (e.g., vLLM, NVIDIA Triton, or TGI) and managing the underlying Kubernetes/GPU orchestration for custom model deployments. * Deep experience designing and institutionalizing AI observability solutions (e.g., LangSmith, Arize, Deepchecks) and advanced tracing and testing methodologies for LLM and agentic systems. * Experience with cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, or GCP) and containerization technologies (Docker, Kubernetes). * Expert level Python is required. * React is strongly preferred. * Experience with large-scale data handling, including unstructured and structured data pipelines, with a strong preference for Snowflake and DynamoDB. * Experience developing and integrating AI-powered APIs and microservices architecture into banking applications. * Experience with vector databases and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) techniques using systems like Elasticsearch, Pinecone, or FAISS for enhancing LLM performance. * Exceptional ability to communicate complex technical concepts, drive consensus among senior technical leaders, and influence organizational AI strategy. * Strong analytical and problem-solving skills with attention to detail and an ability to work with complex, large-scale systems. * Strong collaboration skills, with experience working in agile, cross-functional teams. Nice to have: * Familiarity with regulatory frameworks and ethical considerations in AI within the banking industry (e.g., GDPR, data privacy, model explainability). * Experience in banking or financial services use cases such as conversational AI for customer service, intelligent document processing for loan applications, fraud detection, or risk analysis. Compensation and Benefits The base pay range for this role is listed below. Final base pay offer will be determined based on individual factors such as the candidate’s experience, skills, and location.    To view all of our comprehensive and competitive benefits, visit our Benefits at SoFi page! SOFI PROVIDES EQUAL EMPLOYMENT OPPORTUNITIES (EEO) TO ALL EMPLOYEES AND APPLICANTS FOR EMPLOYMENT WITHOUT REGARD TO RACE, COLOR, RELIGION (INCLUDING RELIGIOUS DRESS AND GROOMING PRACTICES), SEX (INCLUDING PREGNANCY, CHILDBIRTH AND RELATED MEDICAL CONDITIONS, BREASTFEEDING, AND CONDITIONS RELATED TO BREASTFEEDING), GENDER, GENDER IDENTITY, GENDER EXPRESSION, NATIONAL ORIGIN, ANCESTRY, AGE (40 OR OVER), PHYSICAL OR MEDICAL DISABILITY, MEDICAL CONDITION, MARITAL STATUS, REGISTERED DOMESTIC PARTNER STATUS, SEXUAL ORIENTATION, GENETIC INFORMATION, MILITARY AND/OR VETERAN STATUS, OR ANY OTHER BASIS PROHIBITED BY APPLICABLE STATE OR FEDERAL LAW. THE COMPANY HIRES THE BEST QUALIFIED CANDIDATE FOR THE JOB, WITHOUT REGARD TO PROTECTED CHARACTERISTICS. PURSUANT TO THE SAN FRANCISCO FAIR CHANCE ORDINANCE, WE WILL CONSIDER FOR EMPLOYMENT QUALIFIED APPLICANTS WITH ARREST AND CONVICTION RECORDS. NEW YORK APPLICANTS: NOTICE OF EMPLOYEE RIGHTS SOFI IS COMMITTED TO AN INCLUSIVE CULTURE. AS PART OF THIS COMMITMENT, SOFI OFFERS REASONABLE ACCOMMODATIONS TO CANDIDATES WITH PHYSICAL OR MENTAL DISABILITIES. IF YOU NEED ACCOMMODATIONS TO PARTICIPATE IN THE JOB APPLICATION OR INTERVIEW PROCESS, PLEASE LET YOUR RECRUITER KNOW OR EMAIL ACCOMMODATIONS@SOFI.COM. DUE TO INSURANCE COVERAGE ISSUES, WE ARE UNABLE TO ACCOMMODATE REMOTE WORK FROM HAWAII OR ALASKA AT THIS TIME. Internal Employees If you are a current employee, do not apply here - please navigate to our Internal Job Board in Greenhouse to apply to our open roles.