Staff Machine Learning Engineer (Research Scientist) - DFAI

Stack

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
• ▹Do research that ships: drive decisions from experimentation through production systems serving real customers and multiple product teams
• ▹Work across the full ML stack: pretraining objectives, architecture design, distributed training, serving infrastructure, monitoring and cross-team integration
• ▹Establish rigorous evaluation frameworks to measure model performance across diverse use cases
• ▹Build scalable, repeatable pipelines that translate research into production impact
• ▹Partner with teams to define how products integrate with and adapt foundation models, enabling reusable ML infrastructure
• ▹Set technical direction and mentor engineers, raising engineering and experimentation standards
• ▹Represent Plaid's AI and machine learning capabilities in internal and external technical communication

Requirements

• ▹MS: 7-12+ years of industry experience with a 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) and end-to-end production ownership
• ▹Prior technical leadership (tech lead, principal or staff) with cross-team influence and mentorship
• ▹Deep expertise in Transformers, LLMs and foundation models, including large-scale training or domain adaptation
• ▹End-to-end production ownership: shipping models through training, serving, monitoring and iteration in live environments
• ▹Distributed training experience and strong Python and software engineering fundamentals at staff level
• ▹Ability to drive technical alignment across teams: setting standards, defining integration patterns and influencing beyond your immediate scope

Nice to have

• ▹Fintech or financial data domain experience
• ▹External publications or open-source contributions
• ▹Experience defining ML platform capabilities (serving infrastructure, feature stores) used across multiple teams

Soft skills

What we offer

• ▹Comprehensive benefit plan including medical, dental, vision and 401(k)
• ▹Equity and/or commission depending on the position

About the company

Plaid builds the tools thousands of developers use to connect financial accounts to apps, covering 12,000 financial institutions across the US, Canada, UK and Europe. Founded in 2013 and headquartered in San Francisco.