Staff Software Engineer - AI Applications

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, Seattle, Washington D.C., Raleigh, London, and Amsterdam.

Join as one of the founding members of the newly formed AI Applications team, 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 embeds 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.

• 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.

• 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 production 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.

• 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.

Base Salary $264,660 – $369,800 • Offers Equity. Plaid provides a comprehensive benefit plan, including medical, dental, vision, and 401(k).