Experienced Engineering Manager, Payments
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, Seattle, Washington D.C., Raleigh, London, and Amsterdam.
Plaid Payments is building the infrastructure that makes paying from a bank account as simple and as trusted as paying with a card — at better economics for everyone involved. We verify that an account is real and safe to debit, we score the risk of Billions in transactions a month against more than a thousand signals drawn from the Plaid network, and we move billions of dollars a month across ACH, RTP, and FedNow. Our customers range from the largest billers in the country to fintechs moving money in real time. We are in the middle of a shift from selling payment primitives that customers assemble themselves to selling payment decisions: a turnkey verification engine, guaranteed payments where Plaid takes on the risk, and fully managed payment flows. That shift is what takes bank payments from a cheaper alternative to a better one.
You'll lead Plaid's Payments engineering organization—three teams covering account verification, payment risk, and money movement—partnering with our Product Area Lead to co-own the strategy and execution of one of Plaid's largest and fastest-growing businesses. You'll manage three engineering managers, own the engineering hiring bar, and set technical direction across a platform where reliability and correctness carry real financial weight. You'll decide where to invest in foundations versus ship product. You'll work closely with data science on the ML models behind our risk products, with operations and compliance on regulated money movement, and with go-to-market on key deals and customer relationships. This is a role for someone who wants the whole problem: the systems, the people, and the business.
Responsibilities:
- Set engineering strategy for Payments in partnership with the Product Area Lead, balancing product delivery against foundational investment across three teams.
- Manage three engineering managers — coach them, calibrate performance, and build the management bench.
- Own technical direction for the payments platform: verification infrastructure, the Signal risk platform and its ML and data pipelines, money movement rails, and customer-facing APIs and dashboards.
- Hold the reliability bar for systems where failures move money incorrectly.
- Drive recruiting and hiring across the org; set the bar and own pipeline health.
- Drive overall strategy of the product area together with Product leadership.
- Partner cross-functionally with product, data science, PMM, GTM, payment operations, compliance, and customers.
Qualifications:
- 10+ years of software engineering experience and 4+ years in engineering management, including 1+ years managing managers.
- Experience leading an engineering organization of 20+ through an EM layer.
- Experience owning transactional, high-reliability systems where correctness and availability have direct financial consequences.
- Track record of building technical foundations that created compounding returns.
- Experience working cross-functionally with product, data, operations, and business teams as a true partner.
- Nice to have: bank payments experience (ACH, RTP, FedNow, or card rails), experience shipping ML-powered risk or fraud products, and experience leading AI transformation in an engineering org.