Staff Software Engineer - AI Applications

Responsibilities

• Design, develop, and maintain scalable backend services and APIs, as well as intuitive, high-quality frontend applications that bring those systems to life.
• Work with other AI engineers, software engineers and machine learning engineers to architect, design and implement GenAI-powered products and features
• Collaborate across functions to understand user needs, propose and implement AI-powered solutions where they’re expected to have the highest impact
• Design and execute rapid experiments to push the boundaries on potential business impact from emerging AI capabilities, with a focus on minimal viable testing approaches
• Balance creative exploration of possibilities with rigorous evaluation of technical feasibility, product potential and business impact

Requirements

• Experience building backend services and working with microservices or service-oriented architectures
• 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
• Strong debugging and monitoring experience for production systems
• Ability to deeply understand customer and user needs through user research and rapid experimentation - be your own technical PM
• 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-Haves

• 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
• Working knowledge of HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and modern frontend frameworks or libraries, with comfort building user-facing experiences

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.

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.