Staff Software Engineer

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).