Staff AI Applications Engineer – GenAI Platforms

Plaid; Seattle (WA); On-site; USD 265,000 - 370,000; Full time

Job summary

Plaid is building the AI-first platform in Seattle to empower developers and financial products. The role focuses on designing, developing, and scaling GenAI-powered services and experiences that connect millions of users with Plaid’s data and insights capabilities.

Applicants will work with LLMs, prompt engineering, RAG, and vector-based search while ensuring reliability and security across Plaid’s fintech ecosystem.

Qualifications

• Experience building backend services using microservices.
• Hands-on experience with LLMs to ship products with real user feedback.
• Proficiency in prompt engineering, fine-tuning, retrieval augmented generation (RAG).
• Experience with semantic search and vector databases.
• Ability to design and implement GenAI-powered solutions.
• Strong debugging and monitoring for production systems.
• Ability to understand customer needs via user research and rapid experimentation.
• Balance exploratory thinking with feasibility and practical product impact.

Responsibilities

• Design, develop, and maintain scalable backend services and APIs.
• Work with AI, software and ML engineers to build GenAI-powered products.
• Collaborate across teams to implement AI solutions with high impact.
• Design rapid experiments to measure business impact of AI features.
• Balance exploration with rigorous evaluation of feasibility and impact.

Skills

Backend services

Microservices

LLMs in prod

Prompt engineering

Fine-tuning

RAG

Semantic search

Vector databases

Agent orchestration

Monitoring & debugging

User research

Product thinking

Tools

Vector databases

Frontend frameworks

Job description

Plaid is building the AI-first platform in Seattle to empower developers and financial products. The role focuses on designing, developing, and scaling GenAI-powered services and experiences that connect millions of users with Plaid’s data and insights capabilities.

Applicants will work with LLMs, prompt engineering, RAG, and vector-based search while ensuring reliability and security across Plaid’s fintech ecosystem.