Lead technical strategy and development of Plaid’s financial foundation models as a Staff ML Engineer. Own full ML lifecycle from pretraining and data curation to production serving, evaluation, and cross-team integration while mentoring engineers and setting technical standards.
249k – 368k/yr
Hybrid7+ YOEML Engineering
About the role
Responsibilities
Own 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.
Drive research that ships: make decisions from experimentation through production systems that serve real customers and power multiple product teams.
Work across the full ML stack, including pretraining objectives, architecture design, distributed training, serving infrastructure, monitoring, and cross-team integration.
Set technical direction and mentor a high-caliber team, with your work amplifying the capabilities of engineers and product teams across Plaid.
Help hundreds of millions of consumers achieve greater financial freedom through the ML capabilities you build and ship.
Qualifications
MS: 7–12+ years of industry experience with a demonstrated track record of technical leadership and production delivery.
PhD: 5–9+ years of industry experience with evidence of technical leadership (tech lead, principal/staff-equivalent roles) and end-to-end production ownership.
Prior technical leadership experience (tech lead, principal, or staff) with demonstrated 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.
Distributed training experience and strong Python + software engineering fundamentals at a staff level.
Ability to drive technical alignment across teams: setting standards, defining integration patterns, and influencing beyond your immediate scope.
Nice-to-Haves
Fintech / financial data domain experience.
External publications or open-source contributions.
Experience defining ML platform capabilities (serving infra, feature stores) used across multiple teams.
Staff engineer owns large product areas in enterprise GenAI platform, working across backend, frontend, LLMs, and ML models. Solves scalability challenges with 7+ years experience in Python/JS, Kubernetes, and cloud providers.
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