plaid - Staff Software Engineer - Europe

• 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. • 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 • 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. • [Nice to have] Payments domain experience—has worked in payments infrastructure, processing, or a related domain. • [Nice to have] Experience working across time zones with distributed engineering teams. • [Nice to have] Fintech or financial infrastructure experience beyond payments (e.g., credit, lending, identity). • [Nice to have] Familiarity with open banking APIs and bank connectivity patterns. • Our mission at Plaid is to unlock financial freedom for everyone. To support that mission, we seek to build a diverse team of driven individuals who care deeply about making the financial ecosystem more equitable. We recognize that strong qualifications can come from both prior work experiences and lived experiences. We encourage you to apply to a role even if your experience doesn't fully match the job description. We are always looking for team members that will bring something unique to Plaid!