Staff Software Engineer - Data Infrastructure

Plaid

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. The Data Governance team makes sure Plaid handles consumer and customer data responsibly — and can prove it. Our mission is to enforce Plaid's privacy commitments and regulatory obligations in the systems themselves rather than in policy documents: we build the platform and controls that govern how data flows through Plaid — where it lives, who can use it, for what purpose, and for how long. That includes verifiable deletion of consumer data on request, enforcement of data-use restrictions so downstream systems can only use data in permitted ways, and the cataloging and classification that let Plaid know what data it holds and how sensitive it is. We operate at the scale of Plaid's entire data footprint, and correctness and auditability matter to us as much as throughput. As a Staff Software Engineer on Data Governance, you will set the technical direction for how Plaid enforces data governance at scale. You'll lead the design of distributed backend systems that reliably delete, restrict, and track data across dozens of services, making architectural decisions whose blast radius spans the whole company. You'll drive multi-quarter initiatives from ambiguous privacy and regulatory requirements through to shipped, auditable infrastructure — decomposing the hard problems, aligning multiple engineering teams behind a plan, and staying hands-on in the code for the highest-risk pieces. You'll be a force multiplier: raising the technical bar through design reviews and mentorship, and partnering deeply with Legal, Privacy, Security, and product-engineering teams to turn obligations into controls the rest of the company can build on. Responsibilities * Own the technical architecture for Plaid's data-governance platform * Lead the design and delivery of multi-quarter, cross-team initiatives. * Drive design reviews and set engineering standards for reliability, correctness, and auditability across the team's systems. * Partner with Legal, Privacy, Security, and product-engineering teams to shape requirements and unblock adoption of governance controls company-wide. * Mentor engineers and level up the team's technical judgment; act as a technical point of contact for governance concerns raised by other teams. Qualifications Must-haves: * Extensive experience (typically 8+ years) building and operating backend distributed systems at scale, in a language like Go, Java, or similar. * A track record of leading the design of complex systems and driving cross-team technical initiatives to completion. * Strong fundamentals in data stores, consistency, and reliability, with the judgment to reason about correctness and failure modes. * Demonstrated ability to turn ambiguous requirements into clear technical plans and align multiple stakeholders behind them. * Excellent written and verbal communication, including working effectively with non-engineering partners (legal, privacy, compliance). Nice-to-have: * Prior experience with data privacy, governance, or compliance systems (e.g., GDPR/CCPA deletion, data-use/consent enforcement, cataloging/classification, or auditing).     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.

Plaid

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.

Plaid

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. Description of the team * The Dashboard Foundations team is the product platform team that stewards the Plaid Dashboard (dashboard.plaid.com). As both the portal for applying for production access and also the host for many products, the Dashboard is a critical touchpoint for our customers. * Our mission is to build the platform of every product engineer’s dreams, with rich tooling, abstractions, and resources available to support every phase of the software development lifecycle so that developing a high quality, secure product is fast and easy. * Our customers are over a dozen teams building in the Dashboard, representing products in areas such as Fraud, Credit, Signal, Account Verification, Transfer products, and more. * We are a full stack team made up of former product engineers, drawing upon our experience to set our north star vision. We have in-person members in New York and San Francisco as well as some members distributed in various locations across the United States. Responsibilities * You will lead a team of 8 engineers, ranging from Junior to Staff, developing them through clear goal setting, coaching, and feedback. * You’ll define and drive the long-term strategy for this foundational area, in close partnership with technical and product leaders across Plaid. * You’ll collaborate with cross-functional partners to identify high-leverage opportunities, shape the roadmap, and dive deep into technical design and execution details to ensure consistent delivery of high-impact business outcomes. * You’ll uphold a high bar for technical quality and delivery velocity, leading by example. Qualifications * 8+ years of industry experience, that includes time as a Staff-level engineer before transitioning into management. * 1+ years of engineering management experience * Deep experience designing scalable, reliable architectures that support real-world products at scale. * Track record of building and growing high performing engineering teams (either as an engineer or a manager). 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.