Staff Site Reliability Engineer - Release Engineering

Plaid Inc; New York (NY); On-site; USD 130,000 - 180,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Comprehensive benefit plan (medical, dental, vision, 401(k))

Equity and/or commission depending on position

Equal opportunity employer

Job summary

Plaid Inc is looking for a Staff Site Reliability Engineer to lead the reliability practices across product engineering. You will architect SLO and error-budget programs, ensuring new products are production-ready while promoting safety gates for high velocity.

The ideal candidate has over 8 years of experience in backend systems and a proven track record in reliability programs. Join us in transforming the financial ecosystem by making it equitable for everyone.

Qualifications

• Over 8 years of professional experience in backend systems, SRE, or platform engineering roles.
• Proven track record of designing reliability programs for cross-team adoption.
• Direct experience in building canary rollout systems or automated rollback systems.

Responsibilities

• Define and scale Plaid's reliability practices across product engineering.
• Architect the SLO and error-budget programs.
• Collaborate across teams to translate complex needs into self-service tooling.

Skills

Backend systems

SRE

Platform engineering

Reliability standards

Software development (Go)

Kubernetes

Incident response

Observability

Tools

Prometheus

ArgoCD

Job description

We believe that the way people interact with their finances will drastically improve in the next few years. We’re dedicated to empowering this transformation by building the tools and experiences that thousands of developers use to create their own products. Plaid powers the tools millions of people rely on to live a healthier financial life. We work with thousands of companies like Venmo, SoFi, several of the Fortune 500, and many of the largest banks to make it easy for people to connect their financial accounts to the apps and services they want to use. Plaid’s network covers 12,000 financial institutions across the US, Canada, UK and Europe. Founded in 2013, the company is headquartered in San Francisco with offices in New York, Washington D.C., London and Amsterdam.

Plaid's Infrastructure team builds the platforms and tooling that help engineering teams develop, deploy, and operate production systems safely. Release Engineering owns the path from merge to production, including Plaid's zero-touch deployment system, progressive rollouts, metric-gated analysis, and automatic rollback. Our goal is to make safe shipping the default for every product team.

As a Staff Site Reliability Engineer on Release Engineering, you'll define and scale Plaid's reliability practices across product engineering. You'll architect our SLO and error-budget programs, drive the adoption of progressive delivery, and ensure new products are production‑ready. By partnering across product and platform teams, you'll translate complex production needs into intuitive, self‑service tooling. This is a hands‑on technical leadership role where you'll shape the future of our deployment systems — ensuring they remain fast and safe even as AI‑assisted development increases code velocity.

What excites you

• Lead the expansion of reliability standards across product engineering, converting foundational infrastructure into lasting operational habits and tooling.

• Architect and manage the SLO and error‑budget framework, empowering teams to utilize reliability data for strategic product and release choices.

• Promote widespread use of progressive delivery and automated safety gates, ensuring high velocity without compromising production stability.

• Guide emerging product teams toward production readiness through expertise in observability, incident response, and scalable deployment health.

• Collaborate with SRE, Platform, and Infrastructure teams to transform complex production requirements into intuitive, self‑service platform features.

• Direct the response to critical incidents and ensure the resulting post‑mortem actions yield permanent improvements to the platform.

• Prepare for an AI‑driven development landscape by scaling our safety nets to handle an increased volume and frequency of code changes.

What excites us

• Over 8 years of professional experience in backend systems, SRE, or platform engineering roles.

• Proven track record of designing reliability programs—such as service maturity models or SLI frameworks—that achieved cross‑team adoption.

• Direct experience building or operating canary rollout systems, metric‑gated analysis, or automated rollback infrastructure.

• Technical proficiency in software development, with a preference for Go or similar systems languages.

• Ability to drive organizational change and influence engineering culture without formal authority.

• Sound technical judgment in high‑stakes production scenarios, balancing user impact with developer velocity.

• Prior exposure to Kubernetes, service mesh technologies, Prometheus, or ArgoCD is considered a strong asset.

Our culture is rooted in impact and collective growth. We seek technical leaders who resonate with our principles of inventing tomorrow and embracing openness.

Our mission at Plaid is to unlock financial freedom for everyone. To support that mission, we seek to build a diverse team of driven individuals who care deeply about making the financial ecosystem more equitable. We recognize that strong qualifications can come from both prior work experiences and lived experiences. We encourage you to apply to a role even if your experience doesn't fully match the job description. We are always looking for team members that will bring something unique to Plaid!

Plaid is proud to be an equal opportunity employer and values diversity at our company. We do not discriminate based on race, color, national origin, ethnicity, religion or religious belief, sex (including pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical conditions), sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, gender expression, transgender status, sexual stereotypes, age, military or veteran status, disability, or other applicable legally protected characteristics. We also consider qualified applicants with criminal histories, consistent with applicable federal, state, and local laws. Plaid is committed to providing reasonable accommodations for candidates with disabilities in our recruiting process. If you need any assistance with your application or interviews due to a disability, please let us know at [e-mail].

Please review our Candidate Privacy Notice here.

Additional compensation in the form(s) of equity and/or commission are dependent on the position offered. Plaid provides a comprehensive benefit plan, including medical, dental, vision, and 401(k). Pay is based on factors such as (but not limited to) scope and responsibilities of the position, candidate's work experience and skillset, and location. Pay and benefits are subject to change at any time, consistent with the terms of any applicable compensation or benefit plans.