Staff Machine Learning Engineer, Plaid
Fraud Data
$253.2-400k
Infrastructure and APIs for FinTech
Be an early applicant
Infrastructure and APIs for FinTech
1001+ employees
Be an early applicant
$253.2-400k
1001+ employees
Company mission
Plaid's mission is to unlock financial freedom for everyone.
Role
Who you are
- 8+ years total experience, with at least 5 years building and deploying production ML systems
- Proven experience in machine learning infrastructure/operations
- Demonstrated technical leadership and architectural vision, driving systems from concept to production
- Proficiency in Python, PyTorch, Spark, SageMaker, and Airflow, or equivalent technologies
- Nice to have - experience working in fraud detection, risk modeling, or financial security domains
- Nice to have - background in graph machine learning or related techniques
What the job involves
- The Data team within Plaid’s Fraud organization builds the machine learning systems that power Plaid’s cutting-edge fraud detection products
- By leveraging Plaid’s extensive network data, we enable proactive fraud prevention—stopping fraud before it happens
- Our team owns the entire ML lifecycle, from developing feature pipelines and training models to deploying and monitoring them in production
- We ensure that our systems scale reliably and efficiently as Plaid continues to grow and support hundreds of customers
- As a Staff Machine Learning Engineer on Plaid’s Fraud Data team, you will design and build scalable ML infrastructure that powers our industry-leading fraud detection product
- You’ll lead the evolution of our model deployment, monitoring, and observability frameworks to ensure high reliability and performance at scale
- Collaborating closely with teams across ML Infrastructure, Product, and Engineering, you’ll deliver robust systems that protect users and customers from fraud
- In addition, you’ll mentor other engineers and help shape the long-term technical vision and strategy of the Fraud Data team
- Design and build scalable ML infrastructure for Plaid’s fraud detection product
- Working at a fast-pace environment to build a rapidly growing product with a championship team
- Solving complex problems at the intersection of ML systems, data, and reliability
- Building the foundations for fraud detection on the largest financial dataset in the world
- Collaborating with talented engineers and data scientists across Plaid
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
Salary benchmarks
We don't have enough data yet to provide salary benchmarks for this role.
Submit your salary to help other candidates with crowdsourced salary estimates.
Share this job
View 57 more jobs at Plaid