Engineering Manager, AI Applications

Plaid Inc; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 150,000 - 200,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Comprehensive benefits plan including medical, dental, vision

401(k)

Equity and commission options

Job summary

Plaid Inc in San Francisco is looking for a Lead for the AI Applications Team to spearhead their AI-first transformation. You will guide a small team of engineers while defining strategies in collaboration with product and technical stakeholders.

The ideal candidate will possess over 8 years of experience in the industry with a strong background in engineering management and a proven track record in building high-performing teams. This role involves developing AI-powered customer experiences and leading significant projects.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of industry experience, including time as a staff-level engineer.
• 1+ years of engineering management experience.
• Ability to understand customer needs through research and experimentation.
• Track record of building high-performing engineering teams.

Responsibilities

• Lead a team of 4 engineers through goal setting and coaching.
• Define and drive long-term strategies in partnership with technical leaders.
• Architect a trust layer for future agentic commerce.
• Scale AI-powered customer experiences and develop new projects.

Skills

Experience with LLMs

Engineering management

Product iteration with user feedback

User research

Building high-performing teams

Divergent thinking

Curiosity in GenAI

Tools

Prompt engineering

Fine-tuning

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG)

Semantic search

Agent orchestration framework

Evaluation and monitoring framework

Streaming and SSE

Job description

As the leader of the AI Applications Team, you will drive the vision and scale the engineering efforts that enable Plaid’s AI‑first transformation, guiding a small team of developers and collaborating with product, technical, and business stakeholders.

Responsibilities

• You will lead a team of 4 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.
• You will have a front‑row seat to all the latest industry developments, and over time you can become an influential voice in defining where AI > Fintech will be heading.
• 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:
  • Develop and evolve the preferred integration pattern for Plaid with AI providers – from API adaptations to building the official Plaid MCP servers, and beyond.
  • Redefine how Plaid’s consumer link experience embeds into conversational interfaces in the most seamless way.
  • Architect the trust layer for the future of agentic commerce that will become the industry standard.
• Scale and extend our existing successful bets on AI‑powered customer experience. Examples include:
  • Make the next step‑function improvement in our homegrown customer support agent – land our multi‑turn and multi‑agent system that powers a truly delightful experience for our customers; define how to scalably run offline evaluation for complex multi‑turn open‑ended tasks; research and prototype how Human‑In‑The‑Loop Reinforcement Learning (RLHF) can power an insights flywheel; pioneer the architecture for customer‑specific long‑term memory.
  • Extend our agentic system to support other critical parts of the customer journey, starting with areas with the highest ROI – top‑of‑funnel product recommendation, customer onboarding and risk diligence, customer activation and assistance for faster productionization, and upselling and cross‑selling of Plaid products.

Qualifications

Must‑haves

• 8+ years of industry experience, including time as a staff‑level engineer before transitioning into management.
• 1+ years of engineering management experience.
• Hands‑on experience working with LLMs to build products and ship them to product with iterating with real user feedback. Includes:
  • Prompt engineering
  • Fine‑tuning
  • Retrieval‑augmented generation (RAG)
  • Semantic search – vector database and embedding models
  • Agent orchestration framework
  • Evaluation and monitoring framework for open‑ended tasks
  • Streaming and SSE
  • Common UX and design patterns for GenAI‑powered products
• Ability to deeply understand customer and user needs through user research and rapid experimentation; be your own technical PM.
• Track record of building and growing high‑performing engineering teams (either as an engineer or a manager).
• Ability to balance divergent thinking (exploring possibilities) with convergent thinking (evaluating feasibility), critical for driving 0→1 projects.
• Extremely curious and passionate about working in the GenAI applications space.

Nice to have

• Experience training and/or serving ML models in production, or fine‑tuning LLMs for domain‑specific use cases.
• Comfortable operating in privacy/PII‑sensitive environments and applying compliance mitigations.

Benefits

Additional compensation in the form(s) of equity and/or commission may be offered, dependent on the position. Plaid provides a comprehensive benefits plan including medical, dental, vision, and 401(k). Pay is based on factors such as scope and responsibilities, candidate's experience and skillset, and location, and may change at any time consistent with the applicable compensation or benefit plans.