Staff Software Engineer, Data Governance

What you'll do

• Own the technical architecture for Plaid's data-governance platform.
• Lead the design and delivery of multi-quarter, cross-team initiatives.
• Drive design reviews and set engineering standards for reliability, correctness, and auditability.
• Partner with Legal, Privacy, Security, and product-engineering teams to shape requirements and unblock adoption.
• Mentor engineers and level up the team's technical judgment.
• Act as the technical point of contact for governance concerns raised by other teams.
• Design distributed backend systems that reliably delete, restrict, and track data across dozens of services.
• Translate ambiguous privacy and regulatory requirements into shipped, auditable infrastructure.

What we're looking for

• Extensive experience (typically 8+ years) building and operating backend distributed systems at scale in Go, Java, or similar.
• Track record of leading complex system designs and driving cross-team technical initiatives to completion.
• Strong fundamentals in data stores, consistency, and reliability with the judgment to reason about correctness and failure modes.
• Demonstrated ability to turn ambiguous requirements into clear technical plans and align multiple stakeholders.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills, including the ability to work effectively with non-engineering partners.
• Prior experience with data privacy, governance, or compliance systems (preferred).