Senior Machine Learning Engineer (Research Scientist) - Data Foundation & AI

We believe that the way people interact with their finances will drastically improve in the next few years. We’re dedicated to empowering this transformation by building the tools and experiences that thousands of developers use to create their own products. Plaid powers the tools millions of people rely on to live a healthier financial life. We work with thousands of companies like Venmo, SoFi, 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 12,000 financial institutions across the US, Canada, UK and Europe. Founded in 2013, the company is headquartered in San Francisco with offices in New York, Washington D.C., London and Amsterdam.

The Data Foundation and AI team within Plaid’s Data organization builds and maintains the shared machine learning and AI infrastructure that powers capabilities across Plaid’s product suite. The team transforms Plaid’s unique financial network data into general-purpose representations that can be leveraged by teams across the company. They are responsible for the full lifecycle of these systems, including pretraining data curation, model development and training, as well as production deployment, serving, and ongoing monitoring.

As a Senior Research Scientist on the Data Foundation and AI team, you will lead applied research on Plaid’s foundation model by designing model architectures, pretraining objectives, and fine-tuning strategies that generalize across a wide range of downstream product use cases. You will also build and maintain end-to-end production machine learning systems, including training pipelines, model serving infrastructure, feature engineering, and monitoring. In addition, you will develop robust evaluation frameworks to assess model performance across diverse tasks, ensuring quality beyond single-metric optimization.

Responsibilities

• Building a foundation model on one of the world’s richest financial datasets that no one else has.
• Doing research that ships: moving from experimentation and prototypes to production systems serving real customers.
• Working across the full ML stack, from pretraining objectives and architectures to serving infrastructure and monitoring.
• Collaborating with a high-caliber team and seeing your work amplify the capabilities of multiple product teams.
• Helping hundreds of millions of consumers achieve greater financial freedom through data-driven products.

Qualifications

• Strong applied ML research skills with production delivery experience.
• Depth in Transformers/LLMs, representation learning, or large-scale model training.
• Demonstrated ability to ship models to production (not just prototype).
• Distributed training experience and strong Python + software engineering fundamentals.
• Fintech / financial data domain experience is a plus.
• External publications or open-source contributions is a plus.

Our mission at Plaid is to unlock financial freedom for everyone. To support that mission, we seek to build a diverse team of driven individuals who care deeply about making the financial ecosystem more equitable. We recognize that strong qualifications can come from both prior work experiences and lived experiences. We encourage you to apply to a role even if your experience doesn't fully match the job description. We are always looking for team members that will bring something unique to Plaid!
Plaid is proud to be an equal opportunity employer and values diversity at our company. We do not discriminate based on race, color, national origin, ethnicity, religion or religious belief, sex (including pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical conditions), sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, gender expression, transgender status, sexual stereotypes, age, military or veteran status, disability, or other applicable legally protected characteristics. We also consider qualified applicants with criminal histories, consistent with applicable federal, state, and local laws. Plaid is committed to providing reasonable accommodations for candidates with disabilities in our recruiting process. If you need any assistance with your application or interviews due to a disability, please let us know at accommodations@plaid.com.
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228960 - 315360 USD a year

The target base salary for this position ranges from $228,960/year to $315,360/year in Zone 1.

Zone 1 - San Francisco / New York City / Seattle

The base salary range listed for this full-time position excludes commission (if applicable), equity and benefits. The pay range shown on each job posting is the minimum and maximum target for new-hire salaries. Actual pay may be higher or lower depending on factors like skills, experience, and relevant education or training.