Staff Software Engineer - Instant Access

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. Team The Instant Access team, part of the Network Enablement and Access (NEA) organization, builds applied AI systems based on LLM’s that operate autonomously in production. This foundational AI work is directly tied to NEA's most important priorities. Our current focus is automatically creating, repairing, and improving the thousands of long-tail integrations that enable millions of Plaid consumers to connect to their financial institutions. Our goal is for every long-tail institution to be supported by Plaid, with any issues detected, triaged, and resolved automatically. Role As a Staff Software Engineer on Instant Access, you'll set technical foundations for autonomous systems that operate directly in production. You'll work across AI and product engineering to solve ambiguous, high-impact problems, while designing systems that can reason about failures, generate solutions, and safely take action at scale. This is a hands-on role that combines deep technical leadership with implementation. You'll partner closely with engineers, product managers, and leaders across NEA to identify opportunities for automation, define long-term architecture, and build the foundational systems that future AI initiatives will rely on. As an early engineer on the team, you'll significantly influence technical direction and the evolution of a new capability. This could fundamentally change how Plaid builds and operates software. Responsibilities - Define the technical direction and architecture for autonomous AI systems that create, repair, and improve financial institution integrations. - Create novel observability, monitoring, and debugging platforms to provide engineers with deep visibility into the behavior, decisions, and performance of AI-powered systems. - Build LLM-powered code generation pipelines that write, validate, and ship production code end-to-end with minimal human intervention. - Design evaluation frameworks that measure correctness, reliability, and safety for non-deterministic systems operating at scale. - Architect self-healing infrastructure that detects, diagnoses, and repairs itself in under 24 hours. - Develop multi-layer safety architectures to ensure AI systems take the correct actions in production and degrade safely when uncertainty exists. - Partner closely with engineering and product leaders to identify high-leverage automation opportunities and turn them into production systems. - Raise the technical bar across the organization through mentorship, design reviews, and hands-on leadership. Qualifications Must Haves: - 8+ years of strong software engineering experience with a deep focus on backend and/or platform systems - Ability to balance divergent thinking (exploring possibilities) with convergent thinking (evaluating feasibility) - Must be comfortable working hands-on directly in the codebase. This is a builder archetype position. You will spend considerable time designing and then building the actual systems you own. - Must be comfortable moving fast, which means making trade-offs between technical excellence and the rapid deployment of working systems to validate whether approaches are fruitful. Nice to Haves: - Previous experience building pr