Staff Software Engineer
Staff Software Engineer leading the architecture and delivery of Plaid's data governance platform. Design and implement scalable distributed systems for data deletion, usage restrictions, classification, and auditability while partnering with Legal, Privacy, and Security teams.
About the job
Responsibilities
- Own the technical architecture for Plaid's data-governance platform.
- Lead the design and delivery of multi-quarter, cross-team initiatives.
- Drive design reviews and set engineering standards for reliability, correctness, and auditability across the team's systems.
- Partner with Legal, Privacy, Security, and product-engineering teams to shape requirements and unblock adoption of governance controls company-wide.
- Mentor engineers and level up the team's technical judgment; act as a technical point of contact for governance concerns raised by other teams.
Requirements
- Extensive experience (typically 8+ years) building and operating backend distributed systems at scale, in a language like Go, Java, or similar.
- Track record of leading the design of complex systems and driving cross-team technical initiatives to completion.
- Strong fundamentals in data stores, consistency, and reliability, with the judgment to reason about correctness and failure modes.
- Demonstrated ability to turn ambiguous requirements into clear technical plans and align multiple stakeholders behind them.
- Excellent written and verbal communication, including working effectively with non-engineering partners (legal, privacy, compliance).
Nice-to-Haves
- Prior experience with data privacy, governance, or compliance systems (e.g., GDPR/CCPA deletion, data-use/consent enforcement, cataloging/classification, or auditing).
Skills
Go, Java, Distributed Systems, Data Stores, Data Governance, GDPR, CCPA, Data Privacy, Backend Engineering, System Design
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