Staff Machine Learning Engineer (Research Scientist) - DFAI
At a glance
AI generatedTL;DR
As a Staff Machine Learning Engineer on Plaid’s Data Foundation & AI team, you will lead the technical strategy and development of foundational models built on one of the world's richest financial datasets. Your responsibilities include driving decisions across pretraining objectives, model architecture, and fine-tuning approaches that power multiple product applications, overseeing data curation, experimentation, production deployment, and observability. You will establish rigorous evaluation frameworks, build scalable pipelines, and partner with cross-functional teams to define how products integrate with foundation models, enabling reusable ML infrastructure. With deep expertise in Transformers/LLMs/Foundation Models, distributed training, and strong Python fundamentals, you will set technical direction, mentor engineers, and communicate advancements both internally and externally. This role requires a minimum of 7 years of industry experience for MS holders or 5 years for PhDs with proven leadership and production delivery track records.
Skills
What you'll do
- Leading the technical strategy for foundation models, from pretraining to production.
- Driving decisions on model architecture and fine-tuning approaches for diverse applications.
- Overseeing data curation, experimentation, deployment, feature management, and observability.
- Establishing evaluation frameworks to measure model performance across various use cases.
- Partnering with cross-functional teams to integrate foundation models into products.
What we're looking for
- MS or PhD with extensive industry experience and proven technical leadership.
- Deep expertise in Transformers, LLMs, Foundation Models, and large-scale training.
- Proven track record of end-to-end production ownership for ML models.
- Strong Python skills and distributed training experience at a staff level.
- Ability to drive technical alignment and set standards across multiple teams.
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 58 open roles on FindRole.
Listed pay typically runs $204,156–$281,196 across 58 roles with salary data.
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