Senior ML Engineer, Fraud Detection & Production Systems

Plaid; New York (NY); On-site; USD 229,000 - 315,000; Full time

Job summary

Plaid is seeking a Senior Machine Learning Engineer for the Fraud Data team in New York to build models that improve fraud detection across customers. You will identify predictive signals in Plaid's network and lead projects from initial experiments through model deployment and ongoing improvement.

The role focuses on training data, feature engineering, handling label quality and class imbalance, and deploying reliable ML systems in production while exploring new AI approaches to enhance

Qualifications

• 7+ years of professional experience in machine learning, applied science, or software engineering for ML, including hands-on model development and deployment.
• Hands-on experience designing, training, tuning, and deploying models, and measuring improvements in production performance or business metrics.
• Strong ML and statistical fundamentals, including feature engineering, experiment design, model evaluation, and diagnosing why a model underperforms.

Responsibilities

• Investigate fraud patterns and model errors to identify new signals, improve detection, and expand coverage across customers and use cases.
• Develop training datasets and predictive features, addressing challenges such as incomplete labels, class imbalance, data leakage, and changing fraud behavior.
• Design, train, and tune models using traditional and modern ML methods, including gradient‑boosted trees and neural networks, and evaluate newer architectures against existing approaches.
• Design experiments to test features and models, comparing performance across time periods and customer segments using agreed detection and false‑positive metrics.
• Build data and training pipelines that support reproducible experiments and efficient iteration on features and models.
• Deploy models with Engineering and ML Infrastructure partners, balancing detection quality, latency, cost, and reliability.
• Independently lead ML projects, agreeing on priorities and evaluation metrics with Data Science and Product and coordinating work through model release.

Skills

ML experience

Python

SQL

PyTorch

scikit-learn

XGBoost

Model deployment

Tools

PyTorch

scikit-learn

XGBoost

Job description

Plaid is seeking a Senior Machine Learning Engineer for the Fraud Data team in New York to build models that improve fraud detection across customers. You will identify predictive signals in Plaid's network and lead projects from initial experiments through model deployment and ongoing improvement.

The role focuses on training data, feature engineering, handling label quality and class imbalance, and deploying reliable ML systems in production while exploring new AI approaches to enhance