Senior Machine Learning Engineer (Research Scientist, Data Foundation & AI)

Role Overview

Join Plaid’s Data Foundation and AI team as a Senior Machine Learning Engineer. You will lead applied research on Plaid’s foundation model, build production ML systems, and create evaluation frameworks to ensure strong performance across tasks.

Key Missions

• Applied research on Plaid’s foundation model: design model architectures, pretraining objectives, and fine-tuning strategies.
• Production ML systems: build and maintain end-to-end training pipelines, model serving infrastructure, feature engineering, and monitoring.
• Robust evaluation: develop evaluation frameworks to assess model quality across diverse tasks (beyond optimizing a single metric).

Requirements

• Strong applied ML research skills with production delivery experience.
• Experience with distributed training and strong Python + software engineering fundamentals.
• Demonstrated ability to ship models to production (not only prototypes).

Nice-to-haves

• External publications or open-source contributions.
• Deep experience with Transformers/LLMs, representation learning, or large-scale model training.
• Fintech/financial data domain experience.