Staff Machine Learning Engineer (Research Scientist, DFAI)

Join Plaid as a Staff Machine Learning Engineer, where you will lead the technical strategy and development of foundation models that power various product applications. You will oversee the entire machine learning lifecycle, establish evaluation frameworks, and partner with teams across the organization. As a senior technical leader, you will mentor engineers, elevate engineering standards, and communicate technical advancements. This role offers the opportunity to make a significant impact on financial freedom for millions of consumers.

• Lead the technical strategy and development of Plaid’s foundation models, driving key decisions across pretraining objectives, model architecture, and fine-tuning approaches.
• Oversee the full machine learning lifecycle, from data curation and experimentation to production deployment, feature management, and observability.
• Establish rigorous evaluation frameworks to measure model performance across diverse use cases and build scalable, repeatable pipelines that translate research into production impact.
• Prior technical leadership experience (tech lead, principal, or staff) with demonstrated cross-team influence and mentorship
• Deep expertise in Transformers/LLMs/Foundation Models, including large-scale training or domain adaptation
• PhD: 5–9+ years of industry experience with evidence of technical leadership (tech lead, principal/staff-equivalent roles) and end-to-end production ownership
• External publications or open-source contributions - Nice to have
• Fintech / financial data domain experience - Nice to have
• End-to-end production ownership; proven track record shipping models through training, serving, monitoring, and iteration in live environments
• Distributed training experience and strong Python + software engineering fundamentals at a staff level
• Experience defining ML platform capabilities (serving infra, feature stores) used across multiple teams. - Nice to have
• MS: 7–12+ years of industry experience with a demonstrated track record of technical leadership and production delivery
• Ability to drive technical alignment across teams: setting standards, defining integration patterns, and influencing beyond your immediate scope