Staff Software Engineer - Europe

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 Europe is building Plaid in Europe—the open banking platform that makes international expansion one click away for fintechs who want to scale globally. We are the only transatlantic open banking provider, uniquely positioned to help fintechs scale globally with a single Plaid integration. Our team localises, scales, and operates the bank connectivity layer that powers payments, underwriting, onboarding, and identity—abstracting fragmented European rails and regulations into a single, reliable platform. The team owns four core pillars: - Account-to-Account Payments - Cash Flow & Income Insights for Credit - Bank Connectivity Across Europe - Consumer Experience This team operates at the intersection of distributed systems, financial infrastructure, and consumer UX. We solve hard problems in payments reliability, data quality, regulatory complexity, and cross-market expansion—enabling fintechs to launch in new countries with minimal additional engineering effort. We are a high-impact, cross-functional engineering team working closely with US platform teams, GTM, compliance, and operations to make Plaid the default open banking layer for global fintechs operating in Europe. You will serve as the technical leader for Plaid's Europe engineering team, setting direction across a broad product surface area while staying hands-on in the codebase. You'll partner closely with the Engineering Manager and PM to turn product strategy into executable roadmaps, and maintain a strong connection to US platform teams to keep Europe aligned with company-wide engineering investments. Responsibilities - Set technical direction across Europe's product surface area, translating product strategy into clear engineering roadmaps with crisp scoping, sequencing, and tradeoffs. - Stay hands-on—owning high-leverage projects, spiking and prototyping to de-risk, or going deep on the hardest parts of projects others own, depending on the quarter. - Own technical excellence for the team—setting and holding a high bar through design reviews, architectural decisions, and code quality. - Partner closely with the EM and PM to identify opportunities, make tradeoffs, and keep the team focused on the highest-leverage work. - Maintain a strong connection to US engineering and platform teams, ensuring Europe's requirements shape platform decisions and the team leverages shared infrastructure rather than building in isolation. Qualifications - 8+ years of software engineering experience, including operating as a technical lead on a product engineering team. - Strong programming skills in Go, Python, or similar backend languages. - Experience operating and scaling high-availability systems (four 9s) in production—understands the reliability and correctness bar required for critical infrastructure. - Demonstrated track record of effective delegation—has scaled their impact by enabling senior engineers to own technical direction, not by doing everything themselves. - Strong product engineering instinct—can take a product strategy and translate it into a crisp engineering roadmap with clear scoping, sequencing, and tradeoffs. - Experience operating and scaling high-availability systems in production. -