Staff Software Engineer - AI Applications

Plaid

Quick summary

Work type: On-site
Location: San Francisco, CA
Salary: $228,360–$337,260 / yr
Posted: 73 days ago
Nearby: 99+ roles within 25 mi

Market check

Salary context

Above market

How this pay compares to similar roles

Similar $197k

This role $283k

$125k most similar roles pay here $360k

This role pays more than 96% of similar roles. Most pay $162,000–$231,812 — the shaded band above. At the midpoint, this role pays about $283k versus about $197k for comparable roles.

Based on 240 similar postings.

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 81 open roles on FindRole.

Listed pay typically runs $190,800–$262,800 across 81 roles with salary data.

Most-posted roles

View all roles at Plaid

At a glance

TL;DR · Staff Software Engineer - AI Applications

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As a Staff Software Engineer at Plaid’s AI Applications team in San Francisco, you will lead the development of innovative AI solutions that transform how consumers manage their finances and interact with financial services through conversational interfaces. Your day-to-day responsibilities include architecting scalable backend systems for integrating Plaid with AI providers, designing seamless consumer link experiences, and developing trust layers for agentic commerce. You will also enhance existing AI-powered customer support agents by implementing multi-turn dialogue systems and Human-In-The-Loop Reinforcement Learning frameworks. The role requires hands-on experience with large language models (LLMs), prompt engineering, fine-tuning, and semantic search technologies, as well as strong debugging skills in production environments. This position offers a unique opportunity to shape the future of AI in FinTech by addressing complex business challenges and driving impactful product innovations.

Skills

LLMs Prompt engineering Fine-tuning RAG Vector database Embedding models Agent orchestration framework Evaluation and monitoring framework Streaming SSE Microservices Backend services Debugging Monitoring HTML CSS JavaScript UX design patterns CI/CD

What you'll do

Develop and evolve integration patterns for Plaid's AI partnerships.
Redefine seamless embedding of Plaid’s consumer link experience in conversational interfaces.
Architect a trust layer for agentic commerce to become an industry standard.
Implement next-step improvements in homegrown customer support agents using advanced techniques.
Extend agentic systems to cover critical parts of the customer journey with high ROI.
Design and execute rapid experiments to explore business impact from emerging AI capabilities.

What we're looking for

Experience building backend services and working with microservices architectures.
Hands-on experience with LLMs to build and iterate products based on real user feedback.
Strong debugging and monitoring skills for production systems.
Ability to conduct user research and rapid experimentation to understand customer needs.
Balance between creative exploration of possibilities and rigorous evaluation of feasibility.
Passionate about working in the GenAI applications space.
Experience training or fine-tuning LLMs for domain-specific use cases (nice-to-have).

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