# Staff Machine Learning Engineer (Research Scientist) - DFAI at Plaid

- Company: Plaid
- What the company does: Plaid helps all companies build fintech solutions by making it easy, safe and reliable for people to connect their financial data to apps and services. Backed by Index, Kleiner Perkins and NEA.
- Company website: http://plaid.com/
- Type: Startups (AI role)
- Level: Senior
- Location: San Francisco HQ
- Work setup: Remote
- Pay: $249K to $368K base salary per year (USD)
- Posted: 2026-10-21
- Apply by: 2026-12-05
- Apply: https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/plaid/dab31ae8-1e25-4b63-8008-d6930ff72369?utm_source=1752vc&utm_medium=careers
- Page: https://www.1752.vc/careers/jobs/plaid-staff-machine-learning-engineer-research-scientist-dfai/

## About the role

Owning the end-to-end technical strategy for a foundation model built on one of the world's richest financial datasets, from pretraining architecture to production serving. Doing research that ships: driving decisions from experimentation through production systems that serve real customers and power multiple product teams. Found on 1752vc Careers, the job board for startup and VC roles.

## What they're looking for

- MS: 7–12+ years of industry experience with a demonstrated track record of technical leadership and production delivery
- PhD: 5–9+ years of industry experience with evidence of technical leadership (tech lead, principal/staff-equivalent roles) and end-to-end production ownership
- Prior technical leadership experience (tech lead, principal, or staff) with demonstrated cross-team influence and mentorship
- Deep expertise in Transformers/LLMs/Foundation Models, including large-scale training or domain adaptation
- End-to-end production ownership, proven track record shipping models through training, serving, monitoring, and iteration in live environments
- Distributed training experience and strong Python + software engineering fundamentals at a staff level

Tags: All Departments

Source: 1752vc Careers, https://www.1752.vc/careers/jobs/plaid-staff-machine-learning-engineer-research-scientist-dfai/