Staff Software Engineer - Protect

About the company

Plaid provides API-based infrastructure that connects fintech applications to users’ bank accounts while offering additional services like payments and fraud detection.

About this role

We believe that the way people interact with their finances will drastically improve in the next few years. We’re dedicated to empowering this transformation by building the tools and experiences that thousands of developers use to create their own products. Plaid powers the tools millions of people rely on to live a healthier financial life. We work with thousands of companies like Venmo, SoFi, several of the Fortune 500, and many of the largest banks to make it easy for people to connect their financial accounts to the apps and services they want to use. Plaid’s network covers 12,000 financial institutions across the US, Canada, UK and Europe. Founded in 2013, the company is headquartered in San Francisco with offices in New York, Washington D.C., London and Amsterdam. Plaid Protect is a real-time fraud intelligence product built on a unique advantage: Plaid’s network-level visibility across bank accounts, devices, identities, sessions, institutions, applications, and financial behavior. Protect helps customers detect first-party fraud, synthetic identities, account takeovers, and coordinated attacks that are difficult to see from a single application, account, or transaction. Trust Index turns that fraud intelligence into real-time fraud scores and actionable attributes. This team builds the systems that make this intelligence possible: low-latency inference, new data and model integrations, customer-facing APIs and attributes, safe rollouts, and feedback loops. Ti3 expanded Plaid’s fraud graph nearly 10x and, in early testing, detected up to 41% more fraud at the same false-positive rate. Learn more about Ti2 https://plaid.com/blog/plaid-protect-trust-index/ and Ti3 https://plaid.com/blog/introducing-trust-index-3-fraud-detection/. We are a small, high-agency team working closely with Product, Data Science, and Machine Learning. We value demos over docs, conviction over consensus/alignment, builder schedule over meeting-heavy calendars. We’re scrappy and a talent-dense team that has high agency and high ownership. As a Staff Software Engineer on the Protect Core team, you will set the technical direction for the systems that serve Trust Index scores and fraud attributes in real time. You will lead ambiguous, multi-quarter initiatives while staying hands-on in architecture, critical production code, data investigation, and production debugging. You will work closely with DSML teams, product, and fraud researchers to identify opportunities for new fraud signals and product expansions. You will shorten the path from a promising fraud insight to measurable customer value. You will iterate on Protect, from API changes to new integration modes and product modules. This role is best suited to a hands-on builder who enjoys fast feedback loops, direct debate, and making principled tradeoffs between rapid experimentation and durable systems. This role is not for engineers who prefer long-lead design specs, consensus-driven committee decisions, or 'process-heavy' environments. We prioritize shipping over alignment, and we expect you to push back when the process gets in the way of building. Responsibilities: - Care deeply about the product and the value you create for our customers. - Learn how customers use our product and the specific fraud challenges they face; build solutions to address them. - Identify new frontiers in fraud detection, build focused prototypes to test the riskiest assumptions, and turn validated ideas into reliable production systems. - Collaborate closely with the DS/ML team. Better yet, navigate our data landscape, run Jupyter notebooks and Spark jobs, or develop in Tecton to deliver business impact independently. - Lead the team by example on AI assisted engineering: write skills and linters, automate things, push code in unfamiliar languages, systems and repos. - Raise the technical bar through mentorship, design reviews, and hands-on leadership across the organization. Qualifications: - Extensive experience, typically 8+ years, building and operating backend or distributed systems at scale. - Must be comfortable working hands-on directly in the codebase. This is a builder archetype position; the individual will spend considerable time designing and building the actual system they work on. - Strong product judgment: the ability to translate ambiguous customer problems into deliverables, make principled tradeoffs between rapid validation and durable architecture, and define measurable outcomes. - [Nice to have] Strong opinions, conviction, and good product taste. - [Nice to have] Previous experience building data and/or API products. - [Nice to have] Prior experience in the fraud domain - [Nice to have] Prior experience in or interest in building agentic systems. 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 r