Plaid is looking to scale its technical foundation and unlock new product capabilities by hiring Staff Engineers to lead high-impact projects, deliver best-in-class systems, and build infrastructure that makes it easier and safer for engineers to ship critical code.
Requirements
- Experience designing distributed systems, scaling core infrastructure, and navigating complexity to identify impact.
- Strong coding proficiency in a backend language (e.g., Go, Java, Python) and system-level debugging skills.
Responsibilities
- You’ll lead design efforts across infra layers—data pipelines, platform boundaries, service interactions—looking past team lines to improve overall architecture.
- You’ll take on large, technically complex projects that require coordination, influence, and deep attention to reliability, security, and maintainability.
- We expect our Staff+ engineers to stay close to the code, using implementation as a tool to validate architecture, unblock teams, and drive progress on projects.
- You’ll mentor engineers, review technical proposals, and contribute to team norms and standards around architecture, testing, and observability.
- driving architecture for critical Tier-0 systems, or owning the highest priority product engineering initiatives.
- You’ll partner across product, infra, and security teams to shape durable abstractions, resolve architectural debt, and make systems more reliable and explainable.
- You’ll work across domains—like identity resolution, data pipelines, access control, and developer experience—owning decisions that improve quality and accelerate delivery at the company level.
Other
- 8+ years of engineering experience leading projects spanning multiple teams.
- Exceptional product instincts and the ability to connect technical decisions to user and business outcomes.
- Track record of mentorship, elevating technical quality across teams, and influencing without authority.
- High-trust, low-ego communication: you write clearly, listen deeply, and lead with curiosity rather than certainty.
- You’ll lead high-impact projects that cut across teams
