About the job
About Plaid
Plaid builds tools that help developers create new financial products and experiences. Since 2013, Plaid has connected millions of users to over 12,000 financial institutions across the US, Canada, the UK, and Europe. The company partners with organizations like Venmo, SoFi, Fortune 500 firms, and major banks to make linking financial accounts to apps and services easier. Headquarters are in San Francisco, with offices in New York, Washington D. C., London, and Amsterdam.
Team: Data Foundation & AI
The Data Foundation and AI team designs and maintains the machine learning and AI infrastructure that supports Plaid’s products. This group transforms Plaid’s financial network data into flexible formats used by teams across the company. Responsibilities span the entire system lifecycle: data curation for pretraining, model development, deployment, serving, and monitoring in production.
Role Overview: Senior Machine Learning Engineer (Research Scientist)
This position focuses on applied research for Plaid’s foundation model. The Senior Research Scientist leads efforts to design model architectures, set pretraining objectives, and implement fine-tuning strategies that work across a range of product needs. The role also involves building and maintaining production machine learning systems, including training pipelines, model serving, feature engineering, and performance monitoring.
Key Responsibilities
- Design model architectures and define pretraining objectives for Plaid’s foundation model
- Develop and apply fine-tuning methods for diverse product use cases
- Build and maintain end-to-end machine learning systems, from data pipelines to model serving
- Engineer features and monitor system performance in production
- Create evaluation frameworks to measure model quality across multiple tasks and metrics
Location
This role is based in San Francisco.

