Plaid
Staff Machine Learning Engineer (Research Scientist) - DFAI
$249K–$368K
San Francisco HQ +1 · Hybrid · Staff · Full-time · Posted Oct 21, 2026
- Location
- San Francisco HQ
Seattle Office - Experience
- MS: 7–12+ years; PhD: 5–9+ years of industry experience.
- Education
- MS or PhD
About the job
Leads the strategy, research, development, and production deployment of foundation models and shared ML infrastructure for Plaid’s products.
What you'll do
- Set technical strategy for foundation models, including pretraining architecture and production serving.
- Lead the full ML lifecycle, from data curation and experimentation to deployment, evaluation, monitoring, and iteration.
- Set technical direction, mentor engineers, and align teams on reusable ML infrastructure and model integration.
What they ask for
- MS: 7–12+ years of industry experience, or PhD: 5–9+ years of industry experience, with technical leadership and production delivery.
- Prior technical leadership experience with cross-team influence and mentorship.
- Deep expertise in Transformers/LLMs/Foundation Models, including large-scale training or domain adaptation; distributed training experience.
- End-to-end production ownership of models and strong Python and software engineering fundamentals.
Nice to have
- Fintech or financial data domain experience.
- External publications or open-source contributions; experience defining ML platform capabilities is also nice to have.
Pay
$249,120 – $367,920 (base salary; currency not stated)
Tools
Transformers/LLMs/Foundation Models, Python
AI focus
Develop foundation models for financial data, including pretraining, domain adaptation, evaluation, and production deployment across product use cases.
Model-written summary · the original posting is authoritative