Staff Machine Learning Engineer (Research Scientist) - DFAI

Plaid
Germany, San Francisco, Seattle, New York
Workplace: RemoteFull timeUSD 249,120 - 367,920 annuallyFunction: Data Science & Machine LearningSkills: ["Mentorship","Technical leadership","Experimentation standards","Cross-team collaboration","Technical communication"]

Lead Plaid’s foundation model strategy for the Data Foundation & AI team, spanning the full ML lifecycle from data curation and pretraining through distributed training, production deployment, evaluation, monitoring, and observability. Own end-to-end technical decisions on architecture, fine-tuning, and serving approaches, and build scalable pipelines that move research into impact across multiple product teams. Mentor engineers and set standards for experimentation and integration.

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Plaid
Plaid
3 months ago

Staff Machine Learning Engineer (Research Scientist) - DFAI

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Source: Company careers pageValidated by: Fursa AI
Last checked: 5 hours agoStatus: Live

Job Summary

Lead Plaid’s foundation model strategy for the Data Foundation & AI team, spanning the full ML lifecycle from data curation and pretraining through distributed training, production deployment, evaluation, monitoring, and observability. Own end-to-end technical decisions on architecture, fine-tuning, and serving approaches, and build scalable pipelines that move research into impact across multiple product teams. Mentor engineers and set standards for experimentation and integration.
Location: Germany, San Francisco, Seattle, New York
Workplace: Remote
Employment Type: Full time
Job Function: Data Science & Machine Learning
Seniority: Sr. Manager level

Key Responsibilities

  • •Own end-to-end technical strategy for foundation model development from pretraining architecture through production serving.
  • •Drive experimentation that transitions research into production systems serving real customers and multiple product teams.
  • •Work across the full ML stack: pretraining objectives, architecture design, distributed training, serving infrastructure, monitoring, and cross-team integration.
  • •Set technical direction and mentor a high-caliber team to elevate engineering and experimentation standards.
  • •Build reusable ML infrastructure to reduce duplicated modeling and enable downstream product applications.

Pay and Benefits

Salary: USD 249,120 - 367,920 annually
Perks:Health InsuranceDentalVision401k

Key Requirements

  • •MS with 7–12+ years of industry experience and a track record delivering production technical leadership.
  • •PhD with 5–9+ years of industry experience showing technical leadership (tech lead/principal/staff-equivalent) and end-to-end production ownership.
  • •Prior technical leadership with demonstrated cross-team influence and mentorship.
  • •Deep expertise in Transformers/LLMs/Foundation Models, including large-scale training or domain adaptation.
  • •End-to-end production ownership with experience shipping models through training, serving, monitoring, and iteration in live environments.
Skills:MentorshipTechnical leadershipExperimentation standardsCross-team collaborationTechnical communication
Tech Stack:PythonTransformersLLMsFoundation ModelsDistributed trainingModel pretrainingFine-tuningFeature storesServing infrastructureMonitoringEvaluation frameworks

Company Brief

Plaid
Provides APIs that enable applications to connect with users’ bank accounts, verify financial data, and power payment and account verification workflows for fintechs and financial services companies.
Industry: Fintech Infrastructure
Company Size: Enterprise (1,001+ employees)
Growth: Scaleup
Valuation: Unicorn (USD 1B+)
Funding: Series D
Headquarters: San Francisco, United States
Founded: 2013
WebsiteLinkedIn