Staff Machine Learning Engineer (Research Scientist) - DFAI
AI summary of the role
Lead the technical strategy and development of Plaid's foundation models using one of the world's richest financial datasets.
No longer in the current catalog. Last included 2026-09-09. Check the employer’s posting for availability.
What you’ll do
- Own end-to-end technical strategy for a foundation model built on Plaid's financial dataset, from pretraining architecture to production serving.
- Drive decisions from experimentation through production systems that serve real customers and power multiple product teams.
- Work across the full ML stack: pretraining objectives, architecture design, distributed training, serving infrastructure, monitoring, and cross-team integration.
- Set technical direction and mentor a high-caliber team, amplifying capabilities of engineers and product teams across Plaid.
What you’ll bring
- MS: 7–12+ years industry experience with technical leadership and production delivery; PhD: 5–9+ years with evidence of technical leadership and end-to-end production ownership.
- Prior technical leadership experience (tech lead, principal, or staff) with cross-team influence and mentorship.
- Deep expertise in Transformers/LLMs/Foundation Models, including large-scale training or domain adaptation.
- End-to-end production ownership; proven track record shipping models through training, serving, monitoring, and iteration in live environments.
Technologies
Transformers · LLMs · Foundation Models · distributed training · Python · ML infrastructure · serving infrastructure · feature stores · pretraining · fine-tuning
About Plaid
API platform connecting consumer bank accounts to fintech apps; powers account linking, payments, identity, and fraud detection for thousands of fintechs and banks.
Private Late
Source and classification
Internal deployment & tooling · Evidence for this classification:
the shared ML and AI infrastructure that powers intelligent capabilities across Plaid’s product suite. We develop the foundational systems, models, and data assets that transform Plaid’s unique financial network data into scalable, general-purpose representations that teams across the company can leverage. Our work spans the full ML lifecycle — from large-scale data curation and model pretraining to production serving, evaluation, and monitoring. As part of the team, you’ll work at the intersection of machine learning infrastructure, applied AI, and distributed systems, helping establish the core AI platform that enables innovation across Plaid. As a Staff Machine Learning Engineer, you will lead the technical strategy and development of Plaid’s foundation models, driving key decisions across pretraining objectives, model architecture, and fine-tuning approaches that power a wide range
More from the job description
We believe that the way people interact with their finances will drastically improve in the next few years. We’re dedicated to empowering this transformation by building the tools and experiences that thousands of developers use to create their own products. Plaid powers the tools millions of people rely on to live a healthier financial life. We work with thousands of companies like Venmo, SoFi, several of the Fortune 500, and many of the largest banks to make it easy for people to connect their financial accounts to the apps and services they want to use. Plaid’s network covers 12,000 financial institutions across the US, Canada, UK and Europe. Founded in 2013, the company is headquartered in San Francisco with offices in New York, Seattle, Washington D.C., Raleigh, London, and Amsterdam. We are the Data Foundation & AI team within Plaid’s Data organization. Our mission is to build the shared ML and AI infrastructure that powers intelligent capabilities across Plaid’s product suite. We develop the foundational systems, models, and data assets that transform Plaid’s unique financial network data into scalable, general-purpose representations that teams across the company can leverage. Our work spans the full ML lifecycle — from large-scale data curation and model pretraining to production serving, evaluation, and monitoring. As part of the team, you’ll work at the intersection [... source excerpt omitted ...] e learning infrastructure, applied AI, and distributed systems, helping establish the core AI platform that enables innovation across Plaid. As a Staff Machine Learning Engineer, you will lead the technical strategy and development of Plaid’s foundation models, driving key decisions across pretraining objectives, model architecture, and fine-tuning approaches that power a wide range of downstream product applications. You will serve as the technical lead for the full machine learning lifecycle, overseeing everything from data curation and experimentation to production deployment, feature management, and observability. In this role, you will establish rigorous evaluation framewor [... source excerpt omitted ...] tion to define how products integrate with and adapt foundation models, enabling reusable ML infrastructure and reducing duplicated modeling efforts. As a senior technical leader, you will mentor engineers across experience levels, elevate engineering and experimentation standards, and communicate technical advancements both internally and externally as a representative of Plaid’s AI and machine learning capabilities. Responsibilities: Owning the end-to-end technical strategy for a foundation model built on one of the world's richest financial datasets, from pretraining architecture to production serving. Doing research that ships: driving decisions from experimentation throug
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