Staff Software Engineer, Real-Time Fraud Systems

Plaid; New York (NY); On-site; USD 208,000 - 274,000; Full time

Job summary

Plaid is seeking a Staff Software Engineer for the Protect Core team in New York. You will set technical direction for real-time Trust Index scores and fraud attributes, leading multi-quarter initiatives while remaining hands-on in architecture, production code, and debugging.

You will collaborate with DSML, product, and fraud researchers to identify opportunities for new fraud signals and product expansions, shortening the path from insight to customer value and iterating on Protect with new

Qualifications

• Extensive experience, typically 8+ years, building and operating backend or distributed systems at scale.
• Must be comfortable working hands-on directly in the codebase. This is a builder archetype position; the individual will spend considerable time designing and building the actual system they work on.
• Strong product judgment: the ability to translate ambiguous customer problems into deliverables, make principled tradeoffs between rapid validation and durable architecture, and define measurable outcomes.
• Nice to have: Strong opinions, conviction, and good product taste.
• Nice to have: Previous experience building data and/or API products.
• Nice to have: Prior experience in the fraud domain
• Nice to have: Prior experience in or interest in building agentic systems.

Responsibilities

• Care deeply about the product and the value you create for our customers.
• Learn how customers use our product and the specific fraud challenges they face; build solutions to address them.
• Identify new frontiers in fraud detection, build focused prototypes to test the riskiest assumptions, and turn validated ideas into reliable production systems.
• Collaborate closely with the DS/ML team. Better yet, navigate our data landscape, run Jupyter notebooks and Spark jobs, or develop in Tecton to deliver business impact independently.
• Lead the team by example on AI assisted engineering: write skills and linters, automate things, push code in unfamiliar languages, systems and repos.
• Raise the technical bar through mentorship, design reviews, and hands-on leadership across the organization.

Skills

Backend systems

Distributed systems

Hands-on coding

Product judgment

Fraud domain

Data products

API products

Job description

Plaid is seeking a Staff Software Engineer for the Protect Core team in New York. You will set technical direction for real-time Trust Index scores and fraud attributes, leading multi-quarter initiatives while remaining hands-on in architecture, production code, and debugging.

You will collaborate with DSML, product, and fraud researchers to identify opportunities for new fraud signals and product expansions, shortening the path from insight to customer value and iterating on Protect with new