Senior Machine Learning Engineer, Plaid
Research Scientist, Data Foundation & AI
$229-315.4k
+Equity
1-5 days a week in office
Data network powering the tools millions of people rely on to live a healthier financial life
Open for applications
Data network powering the tools millions of people rely on to live a healthier financial life
1001+ employees
Open for applications
$229-315.4k
+Equity
1-5 days a week in office
1001+ employees
Company mission
To unlock financial freedom for everyone.
Role
Who you are
- Strong applied ML research skills with production delivery experience
- Depth in Transformers/LLMs, representation learning, or large-scale model training
- Demonstrated ability to ship models to production (not just prototype)
- Distributed training experience and strong Python + software engineering fundamentals
- Fintech / financial data domain experience is a plus
- External publications or open-source contributions is a plus
- 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
- The Data Foundation and AI team within Plaid’s Data organization builds and maintains the shared machine learning and AI infrastructure that powers capabilities across Plaid’s product suite
- The team transforms Plaid’s unique financial network data into general-purpose representations that can be leveraged by teams across the company
- They are responsible for the full lifecycle of these systems, including pretraining data curation, model development and training, as well as production deployment, serving, and ongoing monitoring
- As a Senior Research Scientist on the Data Foundation and AI team, you will lead applied research on Plaid’s foundation model by designing model architectures, pretraining objectives, and fine-tuning strategies that generalize across a wide range of downstream product use cases
- You will also build and maintain end-to-end production machine learning systems, including training pipelines, model serving infrastructure, feature engineering, and monitoring
- In addition, you will develop robust evaluation frameworks to assess model performance across diverse tasks, ensuring quality beyond single-metric optimization
- Building a foundation model on one of the world’s richest financial datasets that no one else has
- Doing research that ships: moving from experimentation and prototypes to production systems serving real customers
- Working across the full ML stack, from pretraining objectives and architectures to serving infrastructure and monitoring
- Collaborating with a high-caliber team and seeing your work amplify the capabilities of multiple product teams
- Helping hundreds of millions of consumers achieve greater financial freedom through data-driven products
Our take
Plaid builds infrastructure that allows consumers 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 over 12,000 financial institutions in the US, Canada, the UK and Europe. And 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.
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
- Vibrant offices in SF, NYC, and Raleigh-Durham—with catered meals, happy hours, and clubs to keep you connected
- Competitive pay, comprehensive health benefits, and support for fertility, mental health, and parental leave
- Lifestyle perks including home office stipends, daycare support, and commuting benefits like CitiBike and Lyft
Company HQ
SoMa, San Francisco, CA
Leadership
Zach Perret
(Co-Founder & CEO)Previously, Zach was a Consultant at Bain and a Research Fellow and Trustee at Duke before co-founding Plaid ion 2012.
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