Senior Machine Learning Engineer (Research Scientist) - Data Foundation & AI

Plaid

Actively hiring Verified listing
San Francisco Hq, US Posted 42 days ago $228,960–$315,360 / year
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At a glance

AI generated

TL;DR

The Senior Machine Learning Engineer position at Plaid’s Data Foundation & AI team in San Francisco involves leading applied research on foundational models using Plaid’s extensive financial data. This role entails designing model architectures, pretraining objectives, and fine-tuning strategies to support various product use cases across the company. Day-to-day responsibilities include building end-to-end production ML systems, from training pipelines to serving infrastructure and monitoring, while also developing robust evaluation frameworks for diverse tasks. The ideal candidate should have strong applied ML research skills with proven experience in shipping models to production, expertise in Transformers/LLMs or large-scale model training, and proficiency in Python and distributed training. Familiarity with fintech is beneficial, as is a track record of external publications or open-source contributions.

Skills

Python Transformers LLMs Distributed training CI/CD PostgreSQL Kubernetes AWS Terraform Git Jupyter TensorFlow PyTorch Scikit-learn Prometheus Grafana

What you'll do

  • Design model architectures and pretraining objectives for Plaid’s foundation model.
  • Develop fine-tuning strategies that generalize across various downstream product use cases.
  • Build and maintain end-to-end production machine learning systems, including training pipelines.
  • Create robust evaluation frameworks to assess model performance across diverse tasks.
  • Implement monitoring tools for ongoing assessment of deployed models in production.

What we're looking for

  • Strong applied machine learning research skills with production delivery experience.
  • Depth in Transformers/LLMs, representation learning, and large-scale model training.
  • Experience shipping models to production beyond prototyping.
  • Proficiency in distributed training and Python software engineering fundamentals.
  • Fintech or financial data domain experience preferred.
  • External publications or open-source contributions beneficial.

Market check

Salary context

This $228,960–$315,360 range sits above 92% of similar postings on FindRole.

Peer median band

$158,750–$236,500

Median floor and ceiling across peers.

Typical midpoint (25–75%)

$166,670–$238,912

Middle half of comparable postings.

Based on 240 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.

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View all roles at Plaid

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