Staff Software Engineer, Plaid
Security Infrastructure
$172.4-370.8k
Salary range applies to New York City and San Francisco Bay Area and may vary on further locations
Infrastructure and APIs for FinTech
Be an early applicant
Infrastructure and APIs for FinTech
1001+ employees
Be an early applicant
$172.4-370.8k
Salary range applies to New York City and San Francisco Bay Area and may vary on further locations
1001+ employees
Company mission
Plaid's mission is to unlock financial freedom for everyone.
Role
Who you are
- Strong Software Engineering skills: You have 8+ years of experience building distributed systems, backend services, or infrastructure. You care about code quality, testing, and reliability
- You are "security-curious": You understand the fundamentals of security (encryption, auth protocols like OIDC/OAuth, network security) and want to dive deeper. You ask "how can we design this so it can't be misused?" rather than just "is this bug fixed?"
- You think at a system-level: You can visualize complex dependencies and design solutions that work across dozens of microservices
- You are a Partner: You can communicate complex security requirements to product managers and engineers with empathy and clarity
- 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!
What the job involves
- You will join a team responsible for the secure backbone of Plaid. As we look toward 2026, you will have the opportunity to define industry standards in areas like:
- Next-Generation Authorization: We are moving beyond simple RBAC. You will help build a unified, centralized Authorization Platform that enforces fine-grained permissions across all human and non-human identities
- Agentic Security Capabilities: Build AI agents and tooling to automate functions like vulnerability patching, secure code reviews, and anomaly detection
- Zero Trust Architecture: You will evolve our internal token services and identity gateways to enforce rigorous Zero Trust controls for every service, device, and user in our fleet
- AI Guardrails: As Plaid adopts GenAI, you will build the "guardrails" and paved roads that allow our engineers to use LLMs securely, preventing data leakage and model abuse before they happen
- Cryptographic Services: You will own and scale our internal Key Management Systems, the central services for encryption, signing, and key rotation that protect our most sensitive data
- Network Security: You will help us sandbox our sensitive workloads from the internet, preventing command-and-control and data exfiltration
- Design & Code: Write high-quality, scalable code to enhance product security or support security functions
- Architect: Lead the technical design of complex, cross-functional security systems. You will determine how we solve problems like "universal service-to-service authentication" or "global data encryption" at scale
- Consult & Embed: Act as a security subject matter expert for other engineering teams. We embed within engineering teams to build and accelerate security features within our products and frameworks
- Operate: Own your systems in production. We run an on-call rotation for the services we build, ensuring they meet the same high availability standards as our core products
- Innovate: Contribute to the broader security industry. Whether it's open-sourcing our internal tools or contributing to major open-source security projects, we want you to help move the industry forward
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
Company
Funding (last 2 of 6 rounds)
Apr 2025
$575m
LATE VC
Apr 2021
$425m
SERIES D
Total funding: $1.3bn
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 HQ
SoMa, San Francisco, CA
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
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