Engineering Manager, AI Applications

AI is revolutionizing 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 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. They should have peace of mind with a trustworthy consent and authorization manager when agents shop for them. 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.

The AI Applications Team

You will have the opportunity to lead this newly formed team, which builds the backbone for agentic financial workflows with a product full-stack and first principles mindset, and grow with the team in our quest to accelerate Plaid’s transformation into an AI-first company.

You will:

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:

• Architect the trust layer for the future of agentic commerce that will become the industry standard, including consent management, governance, and security

• Build the product full-stack backbone for agentic financial workflows, from workflow design to the end-user experience

• Redefine how Plaid’s consumer link experience embeds into conversational interfaces in the most seamless way

• Develop and evolve the preferred integration pattern for Plaid with AI providers - from API adaptations to building the official Plaid MCP Servers, and beyond

Responsibilities:

• You will lead a team of 6 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.

Qualifications:

• 8+ years of industry experience, including time as a Staff-level engineer before moving into management

• 1+ years of engineering management experience

• Strong product-mindedness: understands customer and user needs, runs rapid experiments - be your own technical PM

• Experience shipping full-stack products end to end, with workflow design and iteration on real user feedback

• A track record of building and growing high-performing engineering teams

• Ability to balance exploring possibilities with judging feasibility, for 0 to 1 work

• Based in San Francisco, in the office 3 days a week

• Curiosity about AI applications in fintech

Nice to haves:

• Hands-on experience shipping LLM-powered products, such as agents, RAG or evals

• Experience training or serving ML models in production

• Comfort with privacy- and PII-sensitive environments

• Experience with AI-native or developer-platform customers and partners

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 br...