Staff Software Engineer, Plaid
Product
$202.8-330k
2 days a week in office
Infrastructure and APIs for FinTech
Open for applications
Infrastructure and APIs for FinTech
1001+ employees
Open for applications
$202.8-330k
2 days a week in office
1001+ employees
Company mission
Plaid's mission is to unlock financial freedom for everyone.
Role
Who you are
- 8+ years of engineering experience leading projects spanning multiple teams
- Experience designing distributed systems, scaling core infrastructure, and navigating complexity to identify impact
- Exceptional product instincts and the ability to connect technical decisions to user and business outcomes
- Strong coding proficiency in a backend language (e.g., Go, Java, Python) and system-level debugging skills
- Track record of mentorship, elevating technical quality across teams, and influencing without authority
- High-trust, low-ego communication: you write clearly, listen deeply, and lead with curiosity rather than certainty
What the job involves
- We're hiring Staff Engineers across multiple teams to help us scale Plaid’s technical foundation and unlock new product capabilities
- You’ll lead high-impact projects that cut across teams, deliver best-in-class systems, and build infrastructure that makes it easier and safer for engineers to ship critical code
- As a Staff Engineer, your impact will extend beyond any single codebase, driving architecture for critical Tier-0 systems, or owning the highest priority product engineering initiatives
- You’ll partner across product, infra, and security teams to shape durable abstractions, resolve architectural debt, and make systems more reliable and explainable
- You’ll work across domains—like identity resolution, data pipelines, access control, and developer experience—owning decisions that improve quality and accelerate delivery at the company level
- You’ll also raise the bar for engineering at Plaid
- That means driving execution directly on ambitious projects, mentoring other engineers, leading technical reviews, and modeling high-context, low-friction collaboration
- You’ll lead design efforts across infra layers—data pipelines, platform boundaries, service interactions—looking past team lines to improve overall architecture
- You’ll take on large, technically complex projects that require coordination, influence, and deep attention to reliability, security, and maintainability
- We expect our Staff+ engineers to stay close to the code, using implementation as a tool to validate architecture, unblock teams, and drive progress on projects
- You’ll mentor engineers, review technical proposals, and contribute to team norms and standards around architecture, testing, and observability
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 52 more jobs at Plaid