Plaid

Staff Software Engineer - Money Movement

Plaid • US
Hybrid
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.

At Plaid, our mission is to build the infrastructure that makes financial services more accessible and reliable—enabling businesses and consumers to move money and manage finances with trust and scale. The Payments Transfer team is central to that mission: we build a multi-rail payment platform to move money between bank accounts for millions of people in the United States.

You will define the future architecture of our Payments Transfer systems, ensuring they are reliable, scalable, and built for long-term growth. Additionally, you will execute against an ambitious product roadmap while partnering closely with product and cross-functional teams.

Responsibilities

  • Lead the technical direction of the transfer system including transfer customer onboarding, billing, bookkeeping, payments processing, reconciliation systems.
  • Collaborate across product, design, operations, partnership, and legal teams to make sure the technical solution meets business needs.
  • Discover system quality and reliability opportunities  and proactively drive improvements and technical roadmap.
  • Work hands-on: write and review technical designs, write and review code, lead major technical initiatives and new feature development.
  • Mentor engineers and contribute to a strong, inclusive team culture.
  • Requirements

  • At least 3-5 years working on payments, billing, invoicing or other financial infrastructure systems.
  • Proven track record of building and operating systems that process payments at scale (e.g., high throughput, high reliability, complex flows such as refunds, settlement).
  • Strong proficiency in distributed system design, architecture, performance optimization, observability, reliability engineering.
  • Experience setting and maintaining engineering best practices (testing, code review, continuous integration/deployment, on-call practices).
  • Excellent communication: able to engage with business/product/operations stakeholders, articulate technical trade-offs, drive alignment.
  • [Nice to have] Experience with modern payment rails (e.g., ACH, real-time bank payments, open banking rails) and multi-rail payments architectures