As a Staff Software Engineer, you will lead complex projects, mentor teams, and enhance the engineering quality and infrastructure at 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.
Network Foundations is Plaid’s authoritative source of truth for the user lifecycle, powering user recognition across integration paths, authentication with Plaid, intelligent and context-aware onboarding flows, and the core user data models that drive insights for Plaid’s newest ML-based products.
We own the living graph of people’s financial lives — and we operate it at global scale for some of the world’s largest companies, including Google, Meta, Shopify, Square, Robinhood, and Venmo.
Our mission is to make Plaid’s network data easy to query, highly accurate, and legally compliant. The infrastructure we build is used by product and machine learning teams across the company to develop high-precision features, analytics, and customer experiences. We focus on enabling consistent data access across both real-time and offline workflows.
Responsibilities
- Design and build backend data systems that make it possible to query a user’s complete financial life (Plaid users, accounts, and transactions, identity) at scale. You will develop and maintain graph-based infrastructure for identity resolution and entity mapping
- Lead high-impact projects from design through execution: your work will touch tens of millions of end-users, the best applications in fintech, and major financial institutions. You will deliver APs and datasets that power fraud detection, credit decisioning, and personal finance insights
- Work on both the 0 to 1 stage and the 1 to n stage of problems
- Collaborate with data science, machine learning, legal and product teams to support feature development and analytics
- Establish best practices for data quality, performance, reliability and explainability
- Contribute to the team’s technical roadmap and strategy, mentor engineers, and help grow a culture of excellence
Qualifications
- 8+ years of software engineering experience, including backend system design and data infrastructure
- Proven experience designing and maintaining distributed systems at scale
- Strong programming skills in Go, Python, or similar backend languages
- Experience working with data platforms (e.g., Redshift, Kafka, Airflow, DBT, or equivalent)
- Familiarity with data modeling and lifecycle challenges
- Strong communication and collaboration skills with cross-functional partners
Nice-to-Haves
- Experience with graph databases or graph-based data modeling
- Exposure to ML infrastructure or support systems (e.g., feature stores, batch/stream data)
- Understanding of data privacy, data access restrictions, or legal compliance in data systems
- Prior experience mentoring or leading technical direction for other engineers
- Experience defining the roadmap of an ambiguous technical area.
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 [email protected].
Please review our Candidate Privacy Notice here.
Top Skills
Go
Java
Python
Plaid San Francisco, California, USA Office
San Francisco, CA, United States, 94105
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