Principal AI Engineer, Risk & Foundation Models

remote work; United States; Remote; USD 180,000 - 280,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Relocation support to hubs (Mexico,Cy,

Flexible work from office or remote

Healthcare coverage

Education budget

Wellness budget

Vacation policy

Job summary

Plata is one of the fastest-growing fintech companies in the world. We’re expanding our Risk & Decisioning team and seek a Principal AI Engineer to set the technical bar and build production-grade models that move business metrics.

You will own the foundation model program end to end—from research direction to models running in production that directly influence credit decisions and risk strategies for a fast-scaling portfolio.

Qualifications

• Proven experience applying deep learning to sequential data.
• Strong foundation in mathematical statistics and probability theory.
• Deep understanding of ML algorithms (GBM, MLP, CNN, RNN, Transformers).
• Experience taking large models to production: distributed training and model serving.
• Strong communication skills.

Responsibilities

• Build an end-to-end foundation model over financial event sequences and fine-tune for downstream tasks (PD, credit limit strategy, fraud detection, collections, propensity models).
• Drive technical decisions end-to-end: methodology → implementation → performance, latency, robustness, interpretability, compliance.
• Take models from research to production: training infra, evaluation, deployment, monitoring.
• Research state-of-the-art approaches, publish work, speak at conferences.
• Mentor senior engineers; establish technical standards for model development.
• Communicate results clearly to cross-functional stakeholders (product, risk, business, leadership).

Job description

Plata is one of the fastest-growing fintech companies in the world. We’re expanding our Risk & Decisioning team and seek a Principal AI Engineer to set the technical bar and build production-grade models that move business metrics.

You will own the foundation model program end to end—from research direction to models running in production that directly influence credit decisions and risk strategies for a fast-scaling portfolio.