Senior Software Engineer - AI Applications

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.

AI and intelligent systems are driving the fifth paradigm shift, following previous technological revolutions like mainframes, personal computers, the internet, and mobile devices.

We believe, in the foreseeable future, AI will revolutionize the FinTech industry - from how consumers understand and manage their finances, to how developers build applications and how all companies operate. The fintech industry landscape will undergo a fundamental reshape.

Plaid in the FinTech AI Ecosystem

Plaid is uniquely positioned to become the financial data and insights backbone for AI applications and platforms in this evolving ecosystem.

We believe consumers should be able to understand and manage their financial life through conversational AI interfaces using natural language. We believe consumers should have peace of mind with a trustworthy consent and authorization manager when agents shop for them. We believe identity verification and financial fraud prevention in AI-powered products should feel seamless and embedded for the end users. The list goes on.

The most important AI companies, major fintechs, and customer agent platforms are actively trying to integrate Plaid into AI-powered products and solutions they build.

Plaid’s AI-powered Experiences for Customers

The explosive growth in model intelligence and increasing relevance for enterprise tasks offer a unique opportunity for Plaid to rethink from the ground up how we operate and interact with our customers for the most optimal experience.

Our early experiments in building AI agents for customer experience are paying off with huge business value. For example, our homegrown AI-powered customer support agents resolve a significant proportion of customer questions and issues within seconds, which would otherwise have required humans hours to work on.

This is just the beginning and there is so much more we could do.

The AI Applications Team

You will have the opportunity to join as one of the founding members of this newly formed team that is dedicated to consolidating and rapidly scaling our successful bets so far, and grow with the team in our quest to accelerate Plaid’s transformation into an AI-first company.

Responsibilities

• Work with other AI engineers, software engineers and machine learning engineers to architect, design and implement GenAI-powered products and features
• Collaborate across functions to understand user needs, propose and implement AI-powered solutions where they’re expected to have the highest impact
• Design and execute rapid experiments to push the boundaries on potential business impact from emerging AI capabilities, with a focus on minimal viable testing approaches
• Balance creative exploration of possibilities with rigorous evaluation of technical feasibility, product potential and business impact

Qualifications

• Strong software engineering fundamentals, including system design and API development
• Hands-on experience building and shipping LLM-powered products, iterating with real user feedback
• Practical experience with prompt engineering, fine-tuning, RAG, semantic search (vector databases and embeddings), agent orchestration frameworks, and evaluation/monitoring of open-ended tasks
• Experience building GenAI-powered product experiences, including streaming/SSE and common UX patterns
• Strong debugging and production monitoring experience
• Ability to deeply understand customer needs through user research and rapid experimentation; comfortable operating as a technical PM when needed
• Ability to balance divergent exploration with pragmatic execution, especially in 0 to 1 environments
• Deep curiosity and passion for building GenAI applications

Nice to Have

• Experience training and deploying ML models in production, including fine-tuning LLMs for domain-specific use cases
• Comfortable operating in privacy- and PII-sensitive environments, with experience applying appropriate compliance and data protection controls