Staff Software Engineer - Real-Time Fraud Platforms

Plaid Inc; United States; On-site; USD 180,000 - 260,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity

401(k)

Healthcare

Job summary

Plaid Inc is seeking a hands-on Staff Software Engineer for the Protect Core team to architect real-time fraud score systems and signals. You will own multi-quarter initiatives, while coding production systems and debugging in a fast-moving environment.

You will collaborate with DSML teams, product, and fraud researchers to identify new signals and drive product expansion. The role emphasizes rapid iteration, architectural rigor, and ownership across the stack.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of experience building and operating backend or distributed systems at scale.
• Must be comfortable working hands-on directly in the codebase.
• Strong product judgment and ability to translate ambiguous problems into deliverables.
• Nice-to-have: strong opinions and good product taste.
• Nice-to-have: experience building data and/or API products.
• Nice-to-have: experience in fraud domain.

Responsibilities

• Care about the product and value delivered to customers.
• Learn how customers use the product and address fraud challenges.
• Identify new fraud detection frontiers and prototype risky assumptions.
• Collaborate with DS/ML teams; run notebooks and Spark jobs; work with data platforms.
• Lead by example on AI-assisted engineering and improve tooling and processes.
• Mentor teams and raise the technical bar through design reviews.

Skills

Backend systems

Distributed systems

Hands-on coding

Mentorship

Tools

Jupyter notebooks

Spark

Tecton

Job description

Plaid Inc is seeking a hands-on Staff Software Engineer for the Protect Core team to architect real-time fraud score systems and signals. You will own multi-quarter initiatives, while coding production systems and debugging in a fast-moving environment.

You will collaborate with DSML teams, product, and fraud researchers to identify new signals and drive product expansion. The role emphasizes rapid iteration, architectural rigor, and ownership across the stack.