Staff Machine Learning Engineer (Research Scientist) - DFAI
$249k - $368k • Remote • San Francisco HQ • FullTime
Posted 4mo ago
Job Location
San Francisco HQ
Tech Stack
Remote Work Policy
Fully remote
Employment Type
FullTime
Categories
Machine Learning Engineer
About the job
Plaid is seeking a Staff Machine Learning Engineer to join the Data Foundation & AI team. This team builds the shared ML and AI infrastructure that powers intelligent capabilities across Plaid's product suite, transforming unique financial network data into scalable, general-purpose representations. The role involves working at the intersection of machine learning infrastructure, applied AI, and distributed systems to establish the core AI platform that enables innovation. The Staff ML Engineer will lead the technical strategy and development of Plaid’s foundation models, driving key decisions across pretraining objectives, model architecture, and fine-tuning approaches. This position requires establishing rigorous evaluation frameworks, building scalable pipelines, and partnering with teams across the organization to define product integrations with foundation models. As a senior technical leader, you will mentor engineers, elevate engineering standards, and represent Plaid's AI and machine learning capabilities externally.
Responsibilities
- Lead the end-to-end technical strategy for foundation models, from pretraining architecture to production serving.
- Drive research that ships, overseeing experimentation through production systems serving real customers.
- Work across the full ML stack, including pretraining, architecture design, distributed training, serving, monitoring, and integration.
- Set technical direction and mentor a high-caliber team, amplifying capabilities across Plaid.
- Help millions of consumers achieve greater financial freedom through built and shipped ML capabilities.
Requirements
- MS with 7-12+ years of industry experience and demonstrated technical leadership and production delivery.
- PhD with 5-9+ years of industry experience and evidence of technical leadership and end-to-end production ownership.
- Prior technical leadership experience (tech lead, principal, or staff) with cross-team influence and mentorship.
- Deep expertise in Transformers/LLMs/Foundation Models, including large-scale training or domain adaptation.
- Proven track record of shipping models through training, serving, monitoring, and iteration in live environments.
- Distributed training experience and strong Python + software engineering fundamentals at a staff level.
- Ability to drive technical alignment across teams, setting standards and influencing beyond immediate scope.
- Experience defining ML platform capabilities (serving infra, feature stores) used across multiple teams (nice to have).
- Fintech / financial data domain experience (nice to have).
- External publications or open-source contributions (nice to have).