# Engineering Manager - Network Health
**Company:** [Plaid](https://scaleengineer.com/companies/plaid)
Lead Plaid's Network Health team as an Engineering Manager, overseeing 5 software engineers and 2 data scientists focused on fraud detection, risk mitigation, and abuse prevention across the platform. This role combines strategic leadership with hands-on technical involvement in backend and data-intensive systems, requiring expertise in risk engineering and the ability to drive technical excellence while managing team growth and roadmap execution in a high-stakes financial services environment.
**Role:** Engineering Manager
**Seniority:** Manager
**Locations:** San Francisco HQ
**Salary:** 216000–291000 USD
[Apply](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/plaid/72c3cb1d-ec3d-4dd2-8fd4-4bd79e86c1f9)
Canonical: https://scaleengineer.com/jobs/plaid/engineering-manager-network-health
---
## Responsibilities

- Lead and Develop Engineering Team: Manage and mentor a team of 5 engineers and 2 embedded data scientists through clear goal setting, constructive coaching, regular feedback cycles, and career development planning. Foster a culture of continuous learning, technical excellence, and psychological safety while building a high-performing unit capable of tackling complex risk engineering challenges.
- Set Strategic Direction and Roadmap: Define the long-term Network Health strategy and product roadmap in close partnership with technical leads, product managers, and business stakeholders across Plaid. Translate evolving fraud scenarios, regulatory requirements, and business objectives into prioritized technical initiatives. Balance competing demands between immediate risk mitigation needs and scalable platform investments.
- Maintain Technical Excellence and Delivery Velocity: Establish and uphold high standards for code quality, system design, and architectural decisions within the team. Lead by example through hands-on technical contributions to design reviews, architecture decisions, and critical implementations. Drive measurable improvements in deployment frequency, system reliability, and risk detection capabilities.
- Analyze Data and Drive Technical Insights: Dive deep into production data, metrics, and system performance to identify trends, bottlenecks, and optimization opportunities. Partner with embedded data scientists to understand fraud patterns and risk signals. Use data-driven insights to inform technical strategy, prioritize engineering efforts, and demonstrate impact to leadership.
- Cross-Functional Collaboration and Execution: Work closely with product teams, security engineers, compliance specialists, and other backend teams to integrate risk detection capabilities across all Plaid products. Navigate complex technical and business tradeoffs in ambiguous situations. Drive execution against roadmaps while adapting to evolving fraud landscapes and market conditions.

## Requirements

### education

- {"name":"Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or Related Field","description":"Formal education in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Mathematics, or related discipline. Equivalent professional experience may substitute for formal degree requirements, particularly for candidates with demonstrated deep technical expertise."}

### technical

- {"name":"Backend Systems Architecture","description":"Deep expertise in designing and maintaining scalable, data-intensive backend systems that handle high-throughput, low-latency requirements. Experience with microservices patterns, event-driven architectures, and API design in production environments serving millions of transactions."}
- {"name":"Risk Engineering and Fraud Detection","description":"Demonstrated hands-on experience building fraud detection systems, risk scoring engines, or abuse prevention platforms. Understanding of fraud patterns, detection methodologies, and real-time decision systems. Experience with building resilient systems that balance false positive rates with detection accuracy."}
- {"name":"Data-Intensive System Design","description":"Proficiency with large-scale data processing, analytics pipelines, and real-time data systems. Experience working with ML systems, data scientists, and analytics platforms. Ability to optimize queries, design efficient data models, and handle data consistency at scale."}
- {"name":"Software Engineering Leadership","description":"Proven ability to lead engineering teams through strategic planning, technical decision-making, and execution. Experience recruiting, hiring, and developing engineers. Track record of setting technical strategy and driving alignment across distributed teams."}

### experience

- {"name":"Staff-Level Engineering Experience","description":"8+ years of total software engineering experience including a significant tenure as a Staff engineer or equivalent (senior individual contributor). Demonstrated ability to influence technical direction at scale, mentor junior engineers, and drive architectural decisions across multiple teams."}
- {"name":"Engineering Management","description":"2+ years of direct experience managing software engineers and leading technical teams. Track record of building and scaling high-performing teams, developing talent, and delivering results in competitive environments. Experience navigating ambiguous situations and making trade-offs between technical excellence and business velocity."}
- {"name":"Risk and Trust Engineering Domain","description":"Experience building systems in risk engineering, fraud detection, abuse prevention, trust and safety, or related domains. Understanding of financial services ecosystems, regulatory requirements, or fintech compliance considerations is highly valuable."}
- {"name":"Roadmap and Strategy Execution","description":"Demonstrated track record of setting technical roadmaps and executing against them in ambiguous, fast-changing environments. Experience balancing product requirements, technical debt, infrastructure investments, and business priorities."}

## Skills

### required

- {"name":"Distributed Systems Design","description":"Strong understanding of distributed systems principles, consistency models, failure modes, and trade-offs. Ability to design systems that scale horizontally and maintain reliability under high load."}
- {"name":"Data Systems and Analytics","description":"Proficiency with SQL, data warehousing, and analytics platforms. Comfortable writing and optimizing complex queries. Understanding of data pipeline architectures and real-time processing systems."}
- {"name":"Risk Modeling and Scoring","description":"Understanding of risk scoring methodologies, feature engineering, and real-time decision systems. Ability to evaluate trade-offs between model accuracy, latency, and false positive rates."}
- {"name":"Team Leadership and Mentoring","description":"Ability to set clear goals, provide constructive feedback, and develop direct reports. Experience conducting technical interviews, building diverse teams, and creating psychological safety within engineering groups."}
- {"name":"Technical Communication","description":"Ability to articulate complex technical concepts to both engineering and non-technical stakeholders. Skill in documenting architecture decisions, design tradeoffs, and technical strategy."}
- {"name":"Production Systems Debugging","description":"Hands-on capability to troubleshoot complex production issues, analyze system metrics, and optimize performance. Experience with observability, logging, tracing, and performance profiling tools."}

### preferred

- {"name":"Fintech or Financial Services Background","description":"Prior experience in fintech, banking, or financial services industries. Familiarity with payment systems, financial data security, and regulatory compliance considerations."}
- {"name":"Machine Learning Systems Integration","description":"Experience collaborating with data scientists and ML engineers to integrate predictive models into production systems. Understanding of model deployment, monitoring, and retraining workflows."}
- {"name":"Incident Response and Chaos Engineering","description":"Experience designing and executing incident response processes, post-mortems, and chaos engineering exercises. Background in building resilient systems capable of graceful degradation."}
- {"name":"API Platform and Integration Design","description":"Experience designing and maintaining APIs that enable third-party integrations. Understanding of rate limiting, authentication, and backward-compatible API evolution."}
- {"name":"Privacy and Data Security","description":"Knowledge of data privacy regulations (GDPR, CCPA), encryption practices, and secure data handling. Experience designing systems that minimize sensitive data exposure."}
- {"name":"Open Source Contributions","description":"Active participation in open-source projects or contributions to community tools. Demonstrates collaborative development practices and ability to work within distributed communities."}

## Tech stack

### tools

- {"name":"Docker and Kubernetes","description":"Containerization and orchestration for deploying microservices at scale, managing risk detection services across multiple regions."}
- {"name":"Prometheus and Grafana","description":"Monitoring and observability stack for tracking system health, fraud detection performance, and alerting on anomalies."}
- {"name":"Datadog","description":"Comprehensive observability platform for distributed tracing, log analysis, and performance monitoring across the risk platform."}
- {"name":"Jenkins or GitLab CI/CD","description":"Continuous integration and deployment pipelines for rapid iteration on fraud detection models and risk algorithms."}
- {"name":"Git and GitHub","description":"Version control and collaborative development platform for managing code across the engineering team."}

### others

- {"name":"Machine Learning and Data Science Tools","description":"Familiarity with scikit-learn, TensorFlow, or PyTorch for understanding and evaluating fraud detection models built by embedded data scientists."}
- {"name":"SQL and Data Query Languages","description":"Advanced SQL capabilities for exploratory data analysis, performance optimization, and deriving insights from large financial transaction datasets."}
- {"name":"APM (Application Performance Monitoring)","description":"Tools for tracking end-to-end latency in risk detection workflows and identifying bottlenecks in critical paths."}
- {"name":"Incident Management Platforms","description":"Tools like PagerDuty for on-call management, incident response coordination, and post-mortem tracking."}

### databases

- {"name":"PostgreSQL","description":"Primary relational database for transactional data, risk assessments, and historical fraud records. Strong consistency and ACID guarantees critical for financial data."}
- {"name":"Redis","description":"In-memory cache for real-time risk scoring, rate limiting, and session management in fraud detection pipelines."}
- {"name":"Elasticsearch","description":"Search and analytics engine for log aggregation, fraud pattern search, and real-time monitoring of risk events."}
- {"name":"BigQuery or Snowflake","description":"Data warehousing solutions for large-scale analytics, historical fraud analysis, and model training datasets."}

### languages

- {"name":"Python","description":"Primary language for data analysis, ML integration, and backend scripting. Widely used for analytics and model evaluation within risk detection systems."}
- {"name":"Go","description":"Excellent choice for high-throughput backend services and microservices. Common in fintech infrastructure for real-time decision systems."}
- {"name":"Java","description":"Enterprise-grade backend language suitable for large-scale distributed systems and long-running services at fintech companies."}
- {"name":"JavaScript/TypeScript","description":"Backend runtime options for services that require rapid iteration and JavaScript ecosystem libraries, increasingly used in fintech platforms."}

### frameworks

- {"name":"GraphQL","description":"API query language enabling flexible, real-time data fetching for risk data aggregation and client applications."}
- {"name":"gRPC","description":"High-performance RPC framework suitable for low-latency inter-service communication in risk detection pipelines."}
- {"name":"REST APIs","description":"Standard API architecture for integrating with financial institutions, third-party services, and internal Plaid products."}
- {"name":"Event Streaming Frameworks","description":"Technologies like Kafka for real-time event processing, critical for fraud detection and risk signal propagation across systems."}

## Benefits

### benefits

- {"name":"Comprehensive Health Coverage","description":"Medical, dental, and vision insurance plans with competitive coverage levels and low out-of-pocket costs. Coverage extends to family members and dependents."}
- {"name":"401(k) Retirement Plan","description":"Tax-advantaged retirement savings plan with potential employer matching contributions. Access to financial planning resources and investment options."}
- {"name":"Equity Compensation","description":"Stock options or RSU grants providing long-term wealth-building opportunity and alignment with company success. Equity vesting typically occurs over 4-year periods."}
- {"name":"Flexible Work Arrangements","description":"Options for remote work, flexible schedules, and work-life balance initiatives. Plaid maintains offices in San Francisco, New York, Seattle, Washington D.C., Raleigh, London, and Amsterdam."}
- {"name":"Professional Development","description":"Learning and development budgets for conferences, courses, and certifications. Access to internal training resources and mentorship programs."}
- {"name":"Paid Time Off","description":"Generous vacation policies, sick leave, and paid holidays. Support for mental health days and sabbatical programs for long-tenured employees."}
- {"name":"Parental Leave","description":"Comprehensive parental leave policies supporting work-life integration for new parents. Backup childcare resources and fertility benefits."}
- {"name":"Commuter and Wellness Benefits","description":"Transit subsidies, gym memberships, wellness programs, and mental health support services. On-site wellness facilities at major office locations."}

## Compensation

- **max:** 260000
- **min:** 165000
- **currency:** USD
- **stockOptions:** true

## Interview process

### steps

## Full description
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’s Network Health team protects Plaid and our network from fraud and abuse. We build robust, intelligent yet flexible risk platforms and services to empower risk detection, mitigation, and resolution across all Plaid products and applications.

As Engineering Manager for Network Health, you will lead a growing, deeply technical team responsible for risk engineering at Plaid. You will set the long-term strategy and roadmap, translate evolving fraud scenarios and business requirements into technical priorities, and drive execution with a high technical bar. You will manage and grow software engineers, partner closely with embedded data scientists and machine learning engineers, and work hands-on with the data to identify trends and opportunities. This role is well suited to a high-agency leader who thrives in ambiguity and wants to remain close to the work while shaping a critical new team.

**Responsibilities:** 

* You’ll lead a team of 5 engineers and 2 embedded data scientists, developing them through clear goal setting, coaching, and feedback.
* You’ll drive the long-term Network Health strategy and roadmap, in close partnership with technical and product leaders across Plaid
* You’ll uphold a high bar for technical quality and delivery velocity, leading by example.
* You’ll dive hands-on into the data and tech stack to understand current metrics, trends, and opportunities - then use those to guide the team’s technical decisions.

**Nice to have:**

* 8+ years of industry experience, that includes time as a Staff-level engineer before transitioning into management.
* 2+ years of engineering management experience
* A track record of setting strategy and executing against roadmaps in ambiguous environments while navigating business, product, and technical tradeoffs.
* Deep technical judgment in backend and data-intensive systems, with the ability to engage directly in architecture, system design, coding, and data analysis.
* Experience in risk engineering, fraud detection, abuse prevention, trust and safety, or a related domain.
* Track record of building and growing high performing engineering teams

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!

Plaid is proud to be an equal opportunity employer and values diversity at our company. We do not discriminate based on race, color, national origin, ethnicity, religion or religious belief, sex (including pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical conditions), sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, gender expression, transgender status, sexual stereotypes, age, military or veteran status, disability, or other applicable legally protected characteristics. We also consider qualified applicants with criminal histories, consistent with applicable federal, state, and local laws. Plaid is committed to providing reasonable accommodations for candidates with disabilities in our recruiting process. If you need any assistance with your application or interviews due to a disability, please let us know at accommodations@plaid.com.

Please review our Candidate Privacy Notice [here](https://plaid.com/legal/#candidate-privacy-notice).  

Additional compensation in the form(s) of equity and/or commission are dependent on the position offered. Plaid provides a comprehensive benefit plan, including medical, dental, vision, and 401(k). Pay is based on factors such as (but not limited to) scope and responsibilities of the position, candidate's work experience and skillset, and location. Pay and benefits are subject to change at any time, consistent with the terms of any applicable compensation or benefit plans.