--- title: 'Engineering Manager, AI Applications at Plaid' canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/engineering-manager-ai-applications-plaid-san-francisco-jaf5qqahqkn7' type: 'job' last_seen: '2026-09-10' --- # Engineering Manager, AI Applications at Plaid - **Company:** [Plaid](https://feeny.ai/companies/plaid) - **Location:** San Francisco, CA - **Compensation:** $238k–$362k - **Employment:** full-time - **Work type:** hybrid - **Posted:** 2026-06-15 - **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-10 - **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/plaid/3b205208-b07b-4acd-8abc-09f0fd0f88f1/application **Skills:** LLMs, Prompt engineering, Fine-tuning, Retrieval augmented generation (RAG), Semantic search, Vector database, Embedding models, Agent orchestration framework, Evaluation and monitoring framework, Streaming, SSE, GenAI applications, Engineering management, ML model training, ML model serving, Domain-specific LLM fine-tuning, Privacy/PII compliance > Lead a team of engineers to build and scale AI-powered customer experiences and integrations for Plaid's FinTech platform. The role involves managing execution, coaching staff, and driving strategy for LLM-based products, agent orchestration, and trust layers in financial AI applications. ## Job description We believe that the way people interact with their finances will drastically improve in the next few years. We’re dedicated to empowering this transformation by building the tools and experiences that thousands of developers use to create their own products. Plaid powers the tools millions of people rely on to live a healthier financial life. We work with thousands of companies like Venmo, SoFi, several of the Fortune 500, and many of the largest banks to make it easy for people to connect their financial accounts to the apps and services they want to use. Plaid’s network covers 12,000 financial institutions across the US, Canada, UK and Europe. Founded in 2013, the company is headquartered in San Francisco with offices in New York, Seattle, Washington D.C., Raleigh, London, and Amsterdam. AI and intelligent systems are driving the fifth paradigm shift, following previous technological revolutions like mainframes, personal computers, the internet, and mobile devices. We believe, in the foreseeable future, AI will revolutionize the FinTech industry - from how consumers understand and manage their finances, to how developers build applications and how all companies operate. The fintech industry landscape will undergo a fundamental reshape. Plaid in the FinTech AI Ecosystem Plaid is uniquely positioned to become the financial data and insights backbone for AI applications and platforms in this evolving ecosystem. We believe consumers should be able to understand and manage their financial life through conversational AI interfaces using natural language. We believe consumers should have peace of mind with a trustworthy consent and authorization manager when agents shop for them. We believe identity verification and financial fraud prevention in AI-powered products should feel seamless and embedded for the end users. The list goes on. The most important AI companies, major fintechs, and customer agent platforms are actively trying to integrate Plaid into AI-powered products and solutions they build. Plaid’s AI-powered Experiences for Customers The explosive growth in model intelligence and increasing relevance for enterprise tasks offer a unique opportunity for Plaid to rethink from the ground up how we operate and interact with our customers for the most optimal experience. Our early experiments in building AI agents for customer experience are paying off with huge business value. For example, our homegrown AI-powered customer support agents resolve a significant proportion of customer questions and issues within seconds, which would otherwise have required humans hours to work on. This is just the beginning and there is so much more we could do. The AI Applications Team You will have the opportunity to lead this newly formed team that is dedicated to rapidly scaling our successful bets so far, and grow with the team in our quest to accelerate Plaid’s transformation into an AI-first company. ## Responsibilities - You will lead a team of 4 engineers, ranging from junior to staff, developing them through clear goal setting, coaching, and feedback - You will define and drive the long-term strategy and manage execution on the team, in close partnership with technical and product leaders across Plaid - Have a front row seat to all the latest industry developments. Over time, with the skills and experience you develop and hone on this team, you can become an influential voice in defining where AI <> Fintech will be heading longer term. You will work with your team to: - Lead projects that enable and scale our business with our largest AI customers and partners, starting with personal finance use cases and expanding into many others; examples include: - Develop and evolve the preferred integration pattern for Plaid with AI providers - from API adaptations to building the official Plaid MCP Servers, and beyond - Redefine how Plaid’s consumer link experience embed into conversational interfaces in the most seamless way - Architect the trust layer for the future of agentic commerce that will become the industry standard - Scale and extend our existing successful bets on AI-powered customer experience; examples include: - Make the next step-function improvement in our homegrown customer support agent - land our multi-turn and multi-agent system that powers a truly delightful experience for our customers; define how to scalably run offline evaluation for complex multi-turn open-ended tasks; research and prototype how Human-In-The-Loop Reinforcement Learning (RLHF) can power an insights flywheel; pioneer the architecture for customer-specific long-term memory, etc. - Extend our agentic system to support other critical parts of the customer journey, starting with areas with the highest ROI - top-of-funnel product recommendation, customer onboarding and risk diligence, customer activation and assistance for faster productionization, as well as upselling and cross-selling of Plaid products. ## Qualifications Must-haves: - 8+ years of industry experience, that includes time as a Staff-level engineer before transitioning into management. - 1+ years of engineering management experience - Hands-on experience working with LLMs to build products and shipping them to product with iterating with real user feedback - including but not limited to: - Prompt engineering - Fine-tuning - Retrieval augmented generation (RAG) - Semantic search - vector database and embedding models - Agent orchestration framework - Evaluation and monitoring framework of open-ended tasks - Streaming and SSE - Common UX and design patterns for GenAI-powered products - Ability to deeply understand customer and user needs through user research and rapid experimentation - be your own technical PM - Track record of building and growing high performing engineering teams (either as an engineer or a manager). - Ability to balance divergent thinking (exploring possibilities) with convergent thinking (evaluating feasibility), which is critical for driving 0 ->1 projects - Extremely curious and passionate about working in GenAI applications space Nice to have: - Experience training and/or serving ML models in production, or fine-tuning LLMs for domain-specific use cases - Comfortable operating in privacy/PII-sensitive environments and applying compliance mitigations Our mission at Plaid is to unlock financial freedom for everyone. To support that mission, we seek to build a diverse team of driven individuals who care deeply about making the financial ecosystem more equitable. We recognize that strong qualifications can come from both prior work experiences and lived experiences. We encourage you to apply to a role even if your experience doesn't fully match the job description. We are always looking for team members that will bring something unique to Plaid! Plaid is proud to be an equal opportunity employer and values diversity at our company. We do not discriminate based on race, color, national origin, ethnicity, religion or religious belief, sex (including pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical conditions), sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, gender expression, transgender status, sexual stereotypes, age, military or veteran status, disability, or other applicable legally protected characteristics. We also consider qualified applicants with criminal histories, consistent with applicable federal, state, and local laws. Plaid is committed to providing reasonable accommodations for candidates with disabilities in our recruiting process. If you need any assistance with your application or interviews due to a disability, please let us know at accommodations@plaid.com. Please review our Candidate Privacy Notice [here](https://plaid.com/legal/#candidate-privacy-notice). Additional compensation in the form(s) of equity and/or commission are dependent on the position offered. Plaid provides a comprehensive benefit plan, including medical, dental, vision, and 401(k). Pay is based on factors such as (but not limited to) scope and responsibilities of the position, candidate's work experience and skillset, and location. Pay and benefits are subject to change at any time, consistent with the terms of any applicable compensation or benefit plans. ## About Plaid ## Company Overview - **One-liner**: Plaid provides a data transfer network and technology platform that powers fintech and digital finance products by enabling applications to securely connect with users' bank accounts. - **Entity Type**: Private (Series D, late-stage) - **Headquarters**: San Francisco, California, United States - **Founded**: 2013 - **Founders**: Zach Perret, William Hockey ## Core Business - **Primary industry**: Financial Technology (Fintech) / Software Development - **Target customers**: B2B — fintech companies, digital financial services, banks, and developers (over 9,000 fintech partners) - **Mission or purpose statement**: "Make digital finance possible" and build a financial system that works for everyone. ## Products & Services - **[Account Linking & Auth]**: The gold standard in account linking with built-in fraud signals, identity verification, and high conversion rates. - **[Transactions, Balance, Identity, Assets, Investments, Liabilities]**: Enriched financial data products for building financial management experiences — categorized transactions, real-time balances, and merchant data. - **[Income & Employment]**: Verification and cash flow data for lending decisions. - **[Payment Initiation (Pay by Bank, Recurring, Payouts)]**: Bank payment solutions built for fintechs that move money at scale. - **[Monitor & Fraud Signals]**: Ongoing risk monitoring and identity verification tools. ## Market Standing - **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not publicly disclosed; raised $1.3B in total funding. - **Key Metric**: Total Funding of $1.3 billion; Annual Revenue estimated at $170M (per LinkedIn). - **Notable Investors/Partners**: Spark Capital (Seed lead), Index Ventures, Kleiner Perkins (Series C leads), Goldman Sachs Investment Partners (Series B lead). Partners with 12,000+ financial institutions across 20 countries. - **Growth Signals**: - 150M+ global users on the Plaid network. - 1M new daily connections across thousands of apps. - 55% YoY European customer growth. - Recognized on Time100 Most Influential Companies 2025. - Named on Forbes Fintech 50 for nine consecutive years. - Listed on Forbes Cloud 100. - Headcount grew 5.7% YoY to ~1,089 employees. ## Competitive Advantages - **Massive Network Effect**: Over 12,000 financial institutions and 9,000+ fintech partners create a powerful ecosystem that is difficult to replicate. - **Developer-First Platform**: High-quality APIs with 99.99% uptime, making Plaid the default infrastructure layer for fintech. - **Global Infrastructure**: Coverage across 20 countries (US, Canada, UK, France, Spain, Ireland, Netherlands, and more) with local expertise. - **Data Moat**: Access to enriched, real-time financial data (transactions, income, balances) that improves lending and fraud decisions. ## Strategic Focus - **European Expansion**: Strong emphasis on growing across Europe, with dedicated local teams and regulatory compliance. - **Payments & Money Movement**: Doubling down on bank payments (Pay by Bank, Payouts) to compete with card networks. - **AI & Engineering Velocity**: Investing in AI coding adoption and developer tooling to accelerate product delivery. - **Platform Expansion**: Moving beyond account linking into lending, identity, and fraud prevention. ## Why Work Here - **Engineering Culture**: Emphasizes a "growth mindset," bottoms-up innovation, and "all-in or nothing" commitment to long-term initiatives. Engineers are empowered to identify opportunities and ship quickly. - **Work Environment**: Vibrant offices in San Francisco (HQ), NYC, Raleigh-Durham, Seattle, and London. Offers catered meals, happy hours, and clubs. Remote options available in the US. - **Benefits**: Competitive pay, comprehensive health benefits (fertility, mental health, parental leave), home office stipends, daycare support, commuting benefits (CitiBike, Lyft). - **Team & Impact**: Over 900 team members across 6 offices globally. Described as a late-stage company that still operates like a startup — high autonomy and fast iteration. - **Growth**: Internship programs available; strong focus on career development and internal mobility. ## Sources 1. [plaid.com](https://plaid.com/) — Official website 2. [plaid.com/careers](https://plaid.com/careers/) — Careers page with benefits and culture 3. [plaid.com/company](https://plaid.com/company/) — About us / mission page 4. [plaid.com/engineering](https://plaid.com/engineering/) — Engineering culture page 5. [linkedin.com/company/plaid-](https://www.linkedin.com/company/plaid-) — LinkedIn profile with financials and headcount 6. [jobs.ashbyhq.com/plaid](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/plaid) — Official job board ## Other roles at Plaid - [Corporate Counsel, Governance and Financial](https://feeny.ai/job/corporate-counsel-governance-and-financial-plaid-san-francisco-m1njc52y7b57) — San Francisco, CA - [Staff Product Manager, Credit](https://feeny.ai/job/staff-product-manager-credit-plaid-new-york-c10256rf054t) — New York, NY - [Senior Data Engineer - Data Engineering](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-data-engineer-data-engineering-plaid-san-francisco-npfse6fjchyj) — San Francisco, CA - [Technical Support Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/technical-support-engineer-plaid-london-s5wrw6d3fjzf) — London, United Kingdom - [Senior Data Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-data-engineer-plaid-new-york-3d4bppdb194r) — New York, NY - [Revenue Enablement Leader](https://feeny.ai/job/revenue-enablement-leader-plaid-united-states-evakrqxr5mrb) — United States - [Senior Product Manager, Consumer](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-product-manager-consumer-plaid-san-francisco-jh39arek688r) — San Francisco, CA - [Revenue Operations Accountant](https://feeny.ai/job/revenue-operations-accountant-plaid-san-francisco-ehpj09gh3acf) — San Francisco, CA - [Enterprise Account Management Leader](https://feeny.ai/job/enterprise-account-management-leader-plaid-new-york-87yh5hg07c3n) — New York, NY - [Software Engineer, Full Stack](https://feeny.ai/job/software-engineer-full-stack-plaid-seattle-m83d415g9yfx) — Seattle, WA