The Engineering Manager for Security Engineering at Plaid leads a team of security engineers responsible for building and operating foundational capabilities that underpin secure development across the company. This includes managing encryption, authentication, CI/CD pipelines, data, and network security to ensure secure-by-default practices are adopted throughout Plaid’s engineering organization. The role involves partnering with product and platform teams to deliver self-service security infrastructure that scales and matures alongside varying levels of security maturity within the organization. Key responsibilities include driving the technical roadmap, making risk-based decisions aligned with business objectives, and representing the team's work to senior leadership. 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/ML security, and identity/access services.
Skills
AWS
Kubernetes
CI/CD
Python
PostgreSQL
Terraform
Docker
Prometheus
Grafana
GitOps
MCP
Agentic Identities
AI Security Governance
Risk-Based Decision Making
What you'll do
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 multiple domains.
Partner with product teams to deliver self-service security infrastructure that scales across varying levels of maturity.
Build secure paved roads for agentic identities and workflows in AI/ML platforms.
Drive measurable improvement in secure-by-default adoption through influence within 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 authN/authZ, encryption, and identity services.
Experience managing engineers in a security or infrastructure context.
Proven track record building scalable platform capabilities used across an organization.
Ability to architect security with developer experience principles in mind.
High-empathy communication skills for senior leadership representation.
Familiarity with AI security risks and control designs.
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