Staff Machine Learning Engineer (Research Scientist) - DFAI
Lead the technical strategy and development of Plaid's foundation models across pretraining, architecture, fine-tuning, data curation, experimentation, production deployment, feature management, evaluation, and observability. Partner across teams to build reusable ML infrastructure and communicate technical advancements.
Responsibilities
- Own end-to-end technical strategy for a foundation model, from pretraining architecture through production serving.
- Drive research decisions from experimentation into production systems serving customers and product teams.
- Work across pretraining, architecture design, distributed training, serving infrastructure, monitoring, and cross-team integration.
- Set technical direction and mentor engineers and product teams across Plaid.
- Build and ship ML capabilities that support financial freedom for consumers.
Requirements
- MS with 7–12+ years of industry experience in technical leadership and production delivery, or PhD with 5–9+ years and evidence of technical leadership and production ownership.
- Prior technical leadership experience as a tech lead, principal, or staff engineer, with cross-team influence and mentorship.
- Deep expertise in Transformers, LLMs, and foundation models, including large-scale training or domain adaptation.
- End-to-end ownership of models through training, serving, monitoring, and iteration in live environments.
- Distributed training experience and strong Python and staff-level software engineering fundamentals.
- Ability to drive technical alignment, set standards, define integration patterns, and influence beyond an immediate team.
- Fintech or financial data experience is nice to have.
- External publications or open-source contributions are nice to have.
- Experience defining ML platform capabilities such as serving infrastructure and feature stores is nice to have.
Benefits
- Medical, dental, vision, and 401(k)
- Additional compensation may include equity and/or commission.