Data Engineering Technical Leader, Plaid
$204.1-360k
1-5 days a week in office
Infrastructure and APIs for FinTech
Be an early applicant
Infrastructure and APIs for FinTech
1001+ employees
Be an early applicant
$204.1-360k
1-5 days a week in office
1001+ employees
Company mission
Plaid's mission is to unlock financial freedom for everyone.
Role
Who you are
- 10+ years of experience in data engineering, with a proven track record of building scalable data systems and pipelines
- Experience working with massive datasets (500TB to petabytes) and developing robust data models and pipelines on top of them
- Lead major data modeling, schema design, and data architecture efforts in past roles
- Deep appreciation for schema design and the ability to evolve analytics schemas on top of unstructured data
- Advanced knowledge of SQL as a flexible, extensible tool and experience with modern orchestration tools like DBT, Mode, and Airflow
- Hands-on experience with performant data warehouses and lakes such as Redshift, Snowflake, and Databricks
- Building and maintaining both batch and real-time pipelines using technologies like Spark and Kafka
- Excited about exploring new technologies and building proof-of-concepts that balance technical innovation with user experience and adoption
- Enjoy getting into the technical details to manage, deploy, and optimize low-level data infrastructure
- Champion for data privacy and integrity, and always act in the best interest of consumers
What the job involves
- Data Engineering is a cornerstone of Plaid's data-focused vision, playing a pivotal role in fostering a data-driven culture and advancing our vision of delivering trustworthy, truly differentiated data products powered by the largest network of user financial profiles
- To support our data-focused vision, we need to scale our data systems while maintaining correct and complete data
- We provide golden datasets and tooling to teams across engineering, product, and business and help them explore our data quickly and safely to get the data insights they need, which ultimately helps Plaid serve our customers more effectively. In addition, Plaid will not be successful if we can't move quickly
- We build the data systems and tools that enable everyone at Plaid to be data-driven, making analytics easy, obvious, and proactive across the company
- Data Engineers heavily leverage SQL and Python to build data workflows that integrate with our Golang applications
- We use tools like DBT, Airflow, Redshift, Atlan, and Retool to orchestrate data pipelines and define workflows
- We work with data scientists, product analytics, business intelligence, software engineers, product managers, and many other teams to build Plaid's data strategy and a data-first mindset
- Our engineering culture is IC-driven -- we favor bottom-up ideation and empowerment of our incredibly talented team
- We are looking for engineers and technical leaders who are motivated by creating impact for our consumers and customers, growing together as a team, shipping the MVP, and leaving things better than we found them
- Drive Data Standards and Culture @ Plaid: You will play a high-impact role in defining and promoting data standards and fostering a strong data-driven culture across Plaid
- Deliver and Scale Golden Datasets: You will own the creation and future iterations of Golden Datasets for all major Plaid data models, driving their adoption across key data use cases to empower teams with reliable and actionable insights
- Shape Unified Data Architecture: You will collaborate with other data practitioners and leaders to design a unified data architecture and conventions, making data at Plaid more accessible and intuitive
- You’ll also enhance data exploration tools to enable efficient and effective usage of data across the organization
- Mentor and Build Technical Excellence: You will mentor junior engineers on the team, providing guidance on designs and implementations
- You’ll play a key role in fostering a strong technical culture, empowering the team to deliver high-quality, scalable solutions
- Serving as the primary technical DRI, defining and executing the long-term technical roadmap to build and sustain a data-driven culture at Plaid
- Working closely with senior leadership and executives to shape Plaid’s data engineering strategy and roadmap, ensuring alignment with the company’s data-focused product goals and overall vision
- Deep understanding of Plaid's products and strategy in order to inform the design of Golden Datasets, set data usage principles, and ensure data is structured for maximum impact and usability
- Focus on delivering well-documented datasets with clearly defined quality metrics, uptime guarantees, and demonstrable usefulness
- Leading critical data engineering projects that foster collaboration across teams, driving innovation and efficiency throughout the company
- Mentoring engineers, operations, and data practitioners on best practices for data organization
- Advocating for the adoption of emerging industry tools and practices, evaluating their fit and implementing them at the right time to keep Plaid at the forefront of data engineering
- Owning core SQL and Python data pipelines that power our data lake and data warehouse, ensuring their reliability, scalability, and efficiency
- Upholding Plaid’s commitment to data quality and privacy, embedding these principles into every aspect of data work
Our take
Plaid builds infrastructure that allows a consumer to interact with their bank account on the web through a number of third-party applications, like Venmo, Robinhood, Coinbase, Acorns and LendingClub.
Plaid has integrated with 12,000 financial institutions in the US, Canada, the UK and Europe. About a quarter of people living in North America with bank accounts have linked with Plaid through at least one of the hundreds of apps that leverage Plaid’s application program interfaces (APIs). The platform allows companies to create financial services applications without having to hire their own team of engineers to build out a tool that connects apps to its users’ bank accounts.
This is very valuable in a world where there are increasing number of fintechs, so the demand for Plaid's services are only going to grow. Despite its strong position, it has not been immune to the difficult global economic situtation and was forced to restructure at the end of 2022, laying off some of its workforce. However it is still experiencing growth and is well-positioned to weather the current economic uncertainty.
Steph
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
Few candidates hear
back within 2 weeks
40% female employees
-15% employee growth in 12 months
Company
Employee endorsements
Opportunities to learn
"Lots of opportunities to grow within your space, the teams in Plaid Europe are small which means you are getting exposure to areas you may not in..."
Funding (last 2 of 5 rounds)
Apr 2021
$425m
SERIES D
Dec 2018
$250m
SERIES C
Total funding: $734.3m
Company benefits
- Monthly wellness stipend (gym on us)
- We offer breakfast, lunch, and dinner to keep you well-fed and healthy (when working from the office)
- From medical, life, dental and pension schemes, we’re here to support your physical, mental, and financial wellbeing
- We want everyone to feel ownership over their work - literally, which is why we offer equity to full-time Plaids
- Every Plaid is in control of their career development with our learning stipends, tools, and trainings
- We give Plaids the freedom and flexibility to choose where they work - whether that is in a Plaid office, at home in any supported location, or a mix of both!
- Two weeks of synchronous, company-wide vacation
- We want to make sure you have time to meet your personal needs with unlimited PTO
Company values
- Impact - We are building a company in order to create outcomes for consumers, and for our customers. The work we do is focused on creating extraordinary results for both. We choose what we work on and measure ourselves by the lasting impact created.
- Grow, together - We constantly strive to learn and improve — as individuals, as a team, and as a company. We foster a culture of feedback, delivered frequently and empathetically. We are each responsible for our own growth, and for the growth of those around us.
- Embrace openness and positivity - These characteristics play an important role in how we interact with each other, and how we represent ourselves to the world. We are intentional with our openness (or clear when we cannot be), and we approach our relationships and challenges with optimism.
- Think rigorously; act with urgency - We work diligently to make sound decisions — but we also recognise that speed matters. We move with urgency to bring our work to the world.
- Make it better - Each of us is an owner of Plaid. We are committed to continuous improvement and leaving things better than we found them. It is not perfection we seek, but valuable, pragmatic improvements to our products, our company, and our craft.
- Consumer outcomes via customer love - Plaid exists to improve outcomes for consumers. The primary way we achieve this is through the love and loyalty of our customers. We work with and through our customers, always with the best interest of the consumer in mind
- Invent tomorrow - We think big and take responsibility for creating the financial ecosystem we want to exist. We don’t wait to see what the future will bring; we create it ourselves
Company HQ
SoMa, San Francisco, CA
Articles
Leadership
Zach Perret
(CEO)He was a Consultant at Bain and previously a Research Fellow and Trustee at Duke before co-founding Plaid
William Hockey
(Board Director)He was previously an associate at Bain and has since moved on from Plaid to become Co-CEO at Column
Salary benchmarks
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Diversity, Equity & Inclusion at Plaid
Andrea Cruz (DEIB Program Manager)
- We are promoting equity by continuing to build employee programs to attract and keep talent growing and thriving at Plaid.
- We foster inclusion by offering annual DEIB education.
- We are building belonging with our four Plaid Community Groups: Plaids of Colour, Plaids of Faith, PLGBTQ+ and Women+.
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