Staff Machine Learning Engineer (Research Scientist) - DFAI

The role

You will lead the technical strategy and development of foundation models. You will work across the full machine learning lifecycle including pretraining, architecture design, and production deployment.

What you will do

• Own the end-to-end technical strategy for a foundation model.
• Drive decisions from experimentation through production systems.
• Work across the full ML stack including pretraining, architecture, and distributed training.
• Set technical direction and mentor a high-caliber team.
• Help consumers achieve greater financial freedom through ML capabilities.

Required qualifications

• MS: 7–12+ years of industry experience with technical leadership and production delivery.
• PhD: 5–9+ years of industry experience with technical leadership and end-to-end production ownership.
• Prior technical leadership experience 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 a track record of shipping models in live environments.
• Distributed training experience.
• Strong Python and software engineering fundamentals at a staff level.
• Ability to drive technical alignment across teams.

Nice to have

• Fintech / financial data domain experience
• External publications or open-source contributions
• Experience defining ML platform capabilities used across multiple teams

Benefits

• Medical
• Dental
• Vision
• 401(k)

About the company

Plaid builds tools and experiences that thousands of developers use to create products. The company's network covers 12,000 financial institutions across the US, Canada, UK and Europe.