# Staff Software Engineer - AI Applications
**Company:** [Plaid](https://hotfix.jobs/companies/plaid)
**Location:** San Francisco, CA
**Salary:** $228K-$370K
**Skills:** JavaScript, HTML, CSS, LLMs, Prompt Engineering, Fine-Tuning, RAG, Semantic Search, Vector Databases, Embedding Models, Agent Orchestration, Microservices, Generative AI, Streaming, Sse
**Posted:** 2026-03-30
> Leads development of AI-powered fintech applications, building scalable backend services, frontend experiences, and GenAI features like agent orchestration and RAG for customer support and integrations. Requires hands-on LLM experience, full-stack skills, and ability to experiment rapidly with user feedback.
## Job Description
## Responsibilities
- Build across the stack: design, develop, and maintain scalable backend services and APIs, as well as intuitive, high-quality frontend applications.
- Work with AI engineers, software engineers, and machine learning engineers to architect, design, and implement GenAI-powered products and features.
- Collaborate across functions to understand user needs and propose/implement AI-powered solutions with highest impact.
- Design and execute rapid experiments to push boundaries on business impact from emerging AI capabilities, focusing on minimal viable testing.
- Balance creative exploration with rigorous evaluation of technical feasibility, product potential, and business impact.

## Requirements
- Experience building backend services and working with microservices or service-oriented architectures.
- Strong working knowledge of **HTML**, **CSS**, **JavaScript**, and modern frontend frameworks or libraries.
- Hands-on experience working with **LLMs** to build and ship products, iterating with real user feedback, including:
  - **Prompt engineering**
  - **Fine-tuning**
  - **Retrieval augmented generation (RAG)**
  - **Semantic search** - vector database and embedding models
  - **Agent orchestration frameworks**
  - **Evaluation and monitoring frameworks** for open-ended tasks
  - **Streaming and SSE**
  - Common UX and design patterns for GenAI-powered products
- Strong debugging and monitoring experience for production systems.
- Ability to deeply understand customer/user needs through user research and rapid experimentation.
- Ability to balance divergent and convergent thinking for 0→1 projects.
- Extremely curious and passionate about GenAI applications.

## Nice-to-Haves
- Experience training/serving ML models in production, or fine-tuning LLMs for domain-specific use cases.
- Comfortable operating in privacy/PII-sensitive environments with compliance mitigations.
**Apply:** https://hotfix.jobs/jobs/staff-software-engineer-ai-applications-at-plaid-3d3f5e5b-7348-42ca-992c-7bcab476945c
**Canonical:** https://hotfix.jobs/jobs/staff-software-engineer-ai-applications-at-plaid-3d3f5e5b-7348-42ca-992c-7bcab476945c