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 in Seattle, you will lead the technical strategy and development of foundational models that power intelligent capabilities across Plaid’s product suite. Your day-to-day responsibilities include overseeing the full ML lifecycle from data curation to production deployment, establishing evaluation frameworks, and building scalable pipelines. You will work closely with cross-functional teams to define how products integrate with foundation models, enabling reusable ML infrastructure. With deep expertise in Transformers/LLMs/Foundation Models and strong Python skills, you will drive technical alignment across teams, set standards for integration patterns, and mentor engineers at various levels. This role requires a proven track record of technical leadership and production delivery, ideally within the fintech domain, though experience with distributed training and ML platform capabilities is also highly valued.
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 full ML lifecycle including data curation, experimentation, deployment, and monitoring.
- Establishing evaluation frameworks to measure model performance across various use cases.
- Partnering with teams to define product integration with foundation models and reusable ML infrastructure.
- Mentoring engineers and elevating technical standards within the organization.
What we're looking for
- MS or PhD with significant 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.
- Experience mentoring engineers and elevating engineering and experimentation standards.
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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