Staff Software Engineer, Product - Plaid

Job Title: Staff Software Engineer, Product
Job Location: San Francisco
Job Listing URL: https://jobs.lever.co/plaid/55eecfac-b1cc-4660-a728-ae840bc9a267
Job Description: We're hiring Staff Engineers across multiple teams to help us scale Plaid’s technical foundation and unlock new product capabilities. You’ll lead high-impact projects that cut across teams, deliver best-in-class systems, and build infrastructure that makes it easier and safer for engineers to ship critical code.

As a Staff Engineer, your impact will extend beyond any single codebase, driving architecture for critical Tier-0 systems, or owning the highest priority product engineering initiatives. You’ll partner across product, infra, and security teams to shape durable abstractions, resolve architectural debt, and make systems more reliable and explainable. You’ll work across domains—like identity resolution, data pipelines, access control, and developer experience—owning decisions that improve quality and accelerate delivery at the company level.

You’ll also raise the bar for engineering at Plaid. That means driving execution directly on ambitious projects, mentoring other engineers, leading technical reviews, and modeling high-context, low-friction collaboration.
Responsibilities
Think in systems. You’ll lead design efforts across infra layers—data pipelines, platform boundaries, service interactions—looking past team lines to improve overall architecture.
Drive execution. You’ll take on large, technically complex projects that require coordination, influence, and deep attention to reliability, security, and maintainability. We expect our Staff+ engineers to stay close to the code, using implementation as a tool to validate architecture, unblock teams, and drive progress on projects.
Level up the team. You’ll mentor engineers, review technical proposals, and contribute to team norms and standards around architecture, testing, and observability.
Qualifications
8+ years of engineering experience leading projects spanning multiple teams.
Experience designing distributed systems, scaling core infrastructure, and navigating complexity to identify impact.
Exceptional product instincts and the ability to connect technical decisions to user and business outcomes.
Strong coding proficiency in a backend language (e.g., Go, Java, Python) and system-level debugging skills.
Track record of mentorship, elevating technical quality across teams, and influencing without authority.
High-trust, low-ego communication: you write clearly, listen deeply, and lead with curiosity rather than certainty.

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