Staff Software Engineer - Protect

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.

Plaid Protect is a real-time fraud intelligence product built on a unique advantage: Plaid's network-level visibility across bank accounts, devices, identities, sessions, institutions, applications, and financial behavior. Trust Index turns that fraud intelligence into real-time fraud scores and actionable attributes. The Protect Core team builds the systems that make this intelligence possible: low-latency inference, new data and model integrations, customer-facing APIs and attributes, safe rollouts, and feedback loops.

• Set the technical direction for the systems that serve Trust Index scores and fraud attributes in real time.
• Lead ambiguous, multi-quarter initiatives while staying hands-on in architecture, critical production code, data investigation, and production debugging.
• Work closely with DS/ML teams, product, and fraud researchers to identify opportunities for new fraud signals and product expansions.
• Build focused prototypes to test the riskiest assumptions and turn validated ideas into reliable production systems.
• Lead by example on AI-assisted engineering: write skills and linters, automate things, and push code in unfamiliar languages, systems and repos.

• Extensive experience, typically 8+ years, building and operating backend or distributed systems at scale.
• Comfortable working hands-on directly in the codebase; a builder archetype who spends considerable time designing and building the actual system.
• Strong product judgment: translate ambiguous customer problems into deliverables, make principled tradeoffs between rapid validation and durable architecture, and define measurable outcomes.
• Nice to have: experience building data and/or API products, prior fraud domain experience, and interest in building agentic systems.

Salary: $207.6K – $273.6K USD. 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).