Staff Software Engineer - AI Applications

Role

You will lead projects that enable and scale our business with our largest AI customers and partners, starting with personal finance use cases and expanding into many others.

• Develop and evolve the preferred integration pattern for Plaid with AI providers - from API adaptations to building the official Plaid MCP Servers, and beyond
• Redefine how Plaid’s consumer link experience embed into conversational interfaces in the most seamless way
• Architect the trust layer for the future of agentic commerce that will become the industry standard

Responsibilities

• Design, develop, and maintain scalable backend services and APIs, as well as intuitive, high-quality frontend applications that bring those systems to life.
• Work with other 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, propose and implement AI-powered solutions where they’re expected to have the highest impact.
• Design and execute rapid experiments to push the boundaries on potential business impact from emerging AI capabilities, with a focus on minimal viable testing approaches.
• Balance creative exploration of possibilities with rigorous evaluation of technical feasibility, product potential and business impact.

Requirements

• Experience building backend services and working with microservices or service-oriented architectures.
• Hands-on experience working with LLMs to build products and shipping them to product with iterating with real user feedback - including but not limited to: Prompt engineering, Fine-tuning, Retrieval augmented generation (RAG), Semantic search - vector database and embedding models, Agent orchestration framework, Evaluation and monitoring framework of open-ended tasks, Streaming and SSE, Common UX and design patterns for GenAI-powered products.
• Strong debugging and monitoring experience for production systems.
• Able to deeply understand customer and user needs through user research and rapid experimentation - be your own technical PM.
• Able to balance divergent thinking (exploring possibilities) with convergent thinking (evaluating feasibility), which is critical for driving 0->1 projects.
• Extremely curious and passionate about working in GenAI applications space.

Nice-to-Haves

• Experience training and/or serving ML models in production, or fine-tuning LLMs for domain-specific use cases.
• Comfortable operating in privacy/PII-sensitive environments and applying compliance mitigations.
• Working knowledge of HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and modern frontend frameworks or libraries, with comfort building user-facing experiences.