Staff Machine Learning Engineer (Research Scientist) - DFAI

Stack

Responsibilities

• ▹Own the end-to-end technical strategy for a foundation model, from pretraining architecture to production serving
• ▹Do research that ships: drive decisions from experimentation through production systems serving real customers
• ▹Work across the full ML stack: pretraining objectives, architecture design, distributed training, serving infrastructure, monitoring
• ▹Set technical direction and mentor a high-caliber team
• ▹Help millions of consumers achieve greater financial freedom through the ML capabilities built and shipped

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)
• ▹Prior technical leadership experience 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 shipping models through training, serving, monitoring, and iteration
• ▹Distributed training experience and strong Python + software engineering fundamentals at staff level
• ▹Ability to drive technical alignment across teams

Nice to have

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

Soft skills

What we offer

• ▹Comprehensive benefits package including medical, dental, and vision insurance, plus a 401(k) plan
• ▹Additional compensation in the form of equity and/or commission depending on the role

About the company

Plaid believes the way people interact with their finances will drastically improve in the coming years. It builds the tools and experiences used by thousands of developers to create their own products, with a network covering 12,000 financial institutions across the US, Canada, UK, and Europe. Founded in 2013, Plaid is headquartered in San Francisco with offices in New York, Washington D.C., London, and Amsterdam.