Engineering Manager - Security

Responsibilities

• Lead, mentor, and grow a team of security engineers, fostering a high-performance, collaborative, and psychologically safe team culture
• Own the technical roadmap and strategic direction for Plaid's core security capabilities across encryption, authN/authZ, CI/CD, data, and network security surfaces to secure Plaid’s AI and MCP ecosystem (internal and external MCP integrations)
• Partner with product and platform engineering teams to deeply understand their needs, and deliver self-service security infrastructure that scales across teams at varying levels of security maturity
• Partner with Data Foundation and AI teams to build secure paved roads for agentic identities and workflows (AI agents, MCP clients, service identities)
• Drive measurable improvement in secure-by-default adoption across Plaid's engineering organization, leading with influence rather than authority
• Make pragmatic, risk-based security decisions and tradeoffs that are consistent with product roadmaps and business objectives
• Represent the team's work and security posture clearly to Staff-level leaders including the CISO, CTO, and COO
• Actively build team stability and strong team dynamics, playing a significant role in hiring, onboarding, growing, and retaining security engineering talent

Qualifications

• 8–14 years of overall software engineering experience, with ~6+ years of that in engineering management roles
• Strong technical background in software engineering, with the ability to understand, evaluate, and guide work on auth systems, encryption, identity/access services, and related security domains in an AWS and K8s environment
• Experience managing engineers in a security, platform, or infrastructure context
• Experience designing and securing AI/ML/Agentic platforms (tool-calling, MCPs, and service identities)
• Familiarity with AI security and governance risks and control designs that preserve developer velocity
• Proven track record building scalable platform capabilities and paved roads used broadly across a product focused engineering organization
• Ability to architect security capabilities and controls with developer experience principles in mind
• Strong cross-functional relationship-building skills, operating effectively as both a technical advisor and a delivery partner to product engineering teams
• High-empathy communication skills, with the ability to represent technical work to senior leadership
• Internal customer focus, with the ability to drive security maturity gains through influence rather than authority
• Experience at a fintech or high-technology organization adjacent to payments or financial services
• Hands-on experience building user and service authN/authZ capabilities, encryption/secrets management services, or internal identity management capabilities at scale at an AWS and K8s environment