Plaid

Staff Machine Learning Engineer (Research Scientist) - DFAI

Plaid
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3 months ago
Seattle, WA, USA +2 moreStaff+
H1B sponsor

Base Salary

$249k - $368k/yr

Responsibilities

  • Own the end-to-end technical strategy for a foundation model, from pretraining architecture through production serving.
  • Drive experiments and research decisions that result in production systems serving customers and multiple product teams.
  • Lead work across pretraining objectives, model architecture, distributed training, serving infrastructure, monitoring, and cross-team integration.
  • Define technical direction, mentor engineers, and establish engineering and experimentation standards.
  • Build scalable evaluation and ML infrastructure that enables reusable capabilities across Plaid.

Requirements

  • An MS with 7–12+ years of industry experience, or a PhD with 5–9+ years of industry experience, plus a demonstrated record of technical leadership and production delivery.
  • Prior technical leadership experience as a tech lead, principal, or staff-equivalent engineer, including cross-team influence and mentorship.
  • Deep expertise in Transformers, LLMs, and foundation models, including large-scale training or domain adaptation.
  • End-to-end experience shipping models through training, serving, monitoring, and iteration in live production environments.
  • Distributed training experience and strong Python and software engineering fundamentals at a staff level.
  • Ability to drive technical alignment, set standards, define integration patterns, and influence beyond the immediate team.
  • Fintech or financial data experience, external publications or open-source contributions, and experience defining shared ML platform capabilities are preferred.

Benefits

  • Comprehensive medical, dental, vision, and 401(k) benefits are provided.
  • Additional equity and/or commission may be available depending on the position offered.
  • Plaid is an equal opportunity employer committed to diversity and reasonable accommodations.

Tech Stack

Categories

Plaid

About Plaid

501-1,000 employees

Plaid is a data network that powers the tools millions of people rely on to live a healthier financial life. Plaid works with thousands of companies like Venmo, SoFi, and Betterment, several of the Fortune 500, and many of the largest banks to make it easy for people to connect their financial accounts to the apps and services they want to use. Plaid’s network covers more than 12,000 financial institutions across the US, Canada, UK and Europe. Headquartered in San Francisco, the company was founded in 2013 by Zach Perret and William Hockey.

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