The Engineering Manager for Security Engineering at Plaid leads a team of security engineers responsible for building and maintaining the core security infrastructure that enables secure development across the company. This includes managing encryption, authentication, CI/CD pipelines, data, and network security to support both internal and external MCP integrations within Plaid’s AI ecosystem. The role involves collaborating with cross-functional teams to define strategic roadmaps, ensuring secure-by-default practices are adopted throughout the organization, and making risk-based decisions that align with business objectives. Ideal candidates have 8-14 years of software engineering experience, including at least six in management roles, with expertise in AWS and K8s environments, AI security, and platform design. They must also possess strong technical credibility, cross-functional relationship-building skills, and the ability to communicate complex security concepts effectively to senior leadership.
Lead and mentor a team of security engineers to build and operate foundational security capabilities.
Define and drive the technical roadmap for Plaid's core security infrastructure across various domains.
Partner with product teams to deliver self-service security solutions that scale across different levels of security maturity.
Build secure paved roads for agentic identities and workflows in AI/ML platforms.
Drive measurable improvement in secure-by-default adoption within Plaid’s engineering organization.
Make pragmatic, risk-based decisions on complex security tradeoffs aligned with business objectives.
What we're looking for
8-14 years of software engineering experience, including at least 6 in management roles.
Strong technical background in security domains like auth systems and encryption in AWS/K8s environments.
Experience managing engineers in security, platform, or infrastructure contexts.
Proven track record building scalable platform capabilities used across product-focused teams.
Ability to architect security with developer experience principles and influence senior leadership.
Familiarity with AI/ML agentic platforms and associated governance risks.
High-empathy communication skills for technical representation to senior leaders.
Market check
Salary context
This
$216,000–$367,200
range sits above
99%
of similar postings on FindRole.
Peer median band
$124,600–$216,300
Median floor and ceiling across peers.
Typical midpoint (25–75%)
$145,700–$195,000
Middle half of comparable postings.
Based on 239 comparable postings.*
* 240 is the maximum number of comparable postings sampled.
Employer
About Plaid
Plaid is a financial technology company that builds a data network powering digital finance applications, enabling consumers to securely connect their financial accounts to apps and services. Industry: Financial Technology & Data Infrastructure
Plaid currently has
127 open roles
on FindRole.
Listed pay typically runs
$186,000–$262,800
across 127 roles with salary data.
9615 Ashburn Va Non-Specific Customer Site, US24 days ago
$69,550–$125,725
AWS
Linux
Python
Ansible
Networking
VPN
DNS
DHCP
VPCs
Firewalls
Splunk
EC2
S3
Lambda
Storage Gateways
CentOS
RHEL
Kali Linux
Rocky Linux
Windows
McAfee
CrowdStrike
CI/CD