Senior Staff Software Engineer – Network Enablement (SF and NYC)

We build simple yet innovative consumer products and developer APIs that shape how everybody interacts with money and the financial system.

The Network Enablement team’s mission is to expand Plaid’s network effects by making data sharing safer, richer, and more valuable for every participant in the ecosystem. We build Plaid’s Consent & Insights Platform: the backbone that lets consumers control how their financial data flows, enables banks and fintechs to meet evolving regulations, and unlocks network‑wide insights that make finance more open and inclusive.

To achieve this goal, we operate across three intertwined domains:

Consent Platform – Core data model, abstractions, enforcement layer, and user experiences that power seamless, compliant data sharing.

Data‑Insight & Risk‑Management Products – Real‑time and batch analytics and ML insights that surface fraud signals, growth metrics, and operational dashboards for banks, fintechs, and data partners.

Open‑Banking Tokenization Services – Industry leading account‑tokenization APIs that simplify connectivity, reduce risk, and unlock new monetization paths for financial institutions.

Architect and ship highly reliable backend services at scale—modeling consent, tokenizing accounts, and exposing APIs used billions of times annually by fintechs, banks, and end users. Lead the design and implementation of AI/ML systems for fraud graph analytics, risk signals, and user primacy insights powering mission-critical financial workflows.

Own technical vision for Plaid’s financial consent and network insights stack, collaborating across Legal, Security, Product, and external standards bodies. A cultural force multiplier—driving design excellence, stewarding blameless on-call practices, and mentoring senior ICs to elevate engineering craft across the org.

Responsibilities

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• Owning problems end‑to‑end, from ambiguous regulatory text to a production system serving millions.
• Balancing rapid product iteration with platform thinking—building abstractions that scale from a single fintech to tier‑1 banks.
• Working at the intersection of backend scale, data infrastructure, and ML, where decisions ripple through Plaid’s entire network.
• Seeing your designs shape emerging open‑finance standards and industry best practices.
• Being the advocate of AI/ML in engineer daily work and product roadmap.

Qualifications

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• 10 + years designing distributed systems
• 3 + years leading multiple teams
• Deep proficiency in Golang (or similar), Kafka, SQL + NoSQL stores, Feature Stores, ML training/serving pipelines,  and cloud‑native architectures
• Track record of building data‑intensive products (ETL, streaming, ML‑serving)
• Strong product sense; comfortable partnering directly with PMs, Counsel, and external regulators
• Passion for mentoring and creating inclusive, high‑agency teams