Staff / Principal

Plaid powers tools that millions rely on for a healthier financial life, working with thousands of companies including Venmo, SoFi, and many Fortune 500 firms. Founded in 2013, headquartered in San Francisco with offices in New York, Seattle, Washington D.C., Raleigh, London, and Amsterdam. Plaid's network covers 12,000 financial institutions across the US, Canada, UK, and Europe.

Plaid Protect is a real-time fraud intelligence product leveraging network-level visibility across bank accounts, devices, identities, sessions, institutions, applications, and financial behavior. Trust Index turns fraud intelligence into real-time fraud scores and actionable attributes. The team builds low-latency inference, new data and model integrations, customer-facing APIs, safe rollouts, and feedback loops. Ti3 expanded Plaid's fraud graph nearly 10x and detected up to 41% more fraud at the same false-positive rate in early testing.

As a Staff Software Engineer on the Protect Core team, you will set technical direction for systems serving Trust Index scores and fraud attributes in real time. You will lead ambiguous, multi-quarter initiatives while staying hands-on in architecture, critical production code, data investigation, and production debugging. You will work closely with DSML teams, product, and fraud researchers to identify opportunities for new fraud signals and product expansions. You will iterate on Protect, from API changes to new integration modes and product modules.

• Care deeply about the product and the value you create for customers; learn how customers use the product and the specific fraud challenges they face; build solutions to address them.
• Identify new frontiers in fraud detection, build focused prototypes to test the riskiest assumptions, and turn validated ideas into reliable production systems.
• Collaborate closely with the DS/ML team; navigate the data landscape, run Jupyter notebooks and Spark jobs, or develop in Tecton to deliver business impact independently.
• Lead the team by example on AI-assisted engineering: write skills and linters, automate things, push code in unfamiliar languages, systems, and repos.
• Raise the technical bar through mentorship, design reviews, and hands-on leadership across the organization.

• Extensive experience, typically 8+ years, building and operating backend or distributed systems at scale.
• Must be comfortable working hands-on directly in the codebase; builder archetype position.
• Strong product judgment: ability to translate ambiguous customer problems into deliverables, make principled tradeoffs between rapid validation and durable architecture, and define measurable outcomes.
• Nice to have: strong opinions, conviction, and good product taste; previous experience building data and/or API products; prior experience in the fraud domain; prior experience in or interest in building agentic systems.

Salary range: $207.6K – $273.6K USD. Additional compensation in the form of equity and/or commission may be offered. Plaid provides a comprehensive benefit plan, including medical, dental, vision, and 401(k).

Apply via the provided application link.