# Staff Software Engineer - Data Governance
**Company:** [Plaid](https://scaleengineer.com/companies/plaid)
Staff Software Engineer on Data Governance at Plaid, a fintech infrastructure leader. Lead the technical architecture for enterprise-scale data governance systems that enforce privacy and regulatory compliance across dozens of microservices. Requires 8+ years of distributed systems expertise in Go, Java, or similar languages, with a demonstrated ability to design complex systems, drive cross-functional initiatives, and transform ambiguous compliance requirements into auditable infrastructure solutions.
**Role:** Staff Software Engineer
**Seniority:** Staff
**Locations:** San Francisco HQ
**Salary:** 207600–273600 USD
[Apply](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/plaid/95225497-fc9b-4c5d-8df0-df98df219ae5)
Canonical: https://scaleengineer.com/jobs/plaid/staff-software-engineer-data-governance
---
## Responsibilities

- Architect and Own Data Governance Platform: Establish the technical vision and architecture for Plaid's data-governance platform, making foundational decisions that govern how data flows through the organization. Design distributed backend systems that reliably handle verifiable deletion, data-use restrictions, and cataloging across dozens of microservices operating at company-wide scale. Ensure the architecture prioritizes correctness, auditability, and operational reliability.
- Lead Cross-Team Technical Initiatives: Champion multi-quarter, high-impact initiatives from ambiguous privacy and regulatory requirements through successful deployment. Decompose complex compliance challenges into concrete technical solutions, align engineering teams around a shared technical plan, and maintain hands-on involvement in highest-risk implementation areas to ensure correctness.
- Drive Design Excellence and Engineering Standards: Conduct rigorous design reviews and establish engineering standards for reliability, correctness, and auditability across data governance systems. Set the technical bar for the team, ensuring designs account for failure modes, data consistency, and compliance verification requirements. Make architectural decisions whose impact spans the entire company.
- Cross-Functional Stakeholder Alignment: Partner deeply with Legal, Privacy, Security, and product-engineering teams to translate regulatory obligations and privacy commitments into implementable technical controls. Serve as the technical point of contact for governance concerns raised by other teams, translating policy requirements into platform capabilities that enable downstream adoption.
- Technical Leadership and Mentorship: Mentor and elevate engineers on the team, increasing their technical judgment and capability to tackle complex distributed systems problems. Act as a force multiplier by sharing expertise in system design, data consistency patterns, and compliance-aware architecture. Develop the next generation of technical leaders within the data governance function.

## Requirements

### education

- {"name":"Computer Science or Related Field","description":"Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or related discipline preferred. However, equivalent professional experience demonstrating strong computer science fundamentals and systems thinking is valued equally."}

### technical

- {"name":"Distributed Systems Architecture","description":"Extensive expertise designing, building, and operating backend distributed systems at scale. Proven ability to architect systems handling terabyte-scale data flows, reasoning about consistency guarantees, failure modes, and recovery strategies. Experience with service-oriented architectures, event-driven systems, and handling cross-service coordination challenges."}
- {"name":"Backend Language Proficiency","description":"Strong production experience with Go, Java, Scala, or similar systems programming languages. Deep understanding of language ecosystems, performance characteristics, and libraries relevant to building reliable infrastructure. Demonstrated hands-on capability to implement complex algorithms and system components."}
- {"name":"Data Stores and Consistency","description":"Strong fundamentals in relational and non-relational data stores, transactional semantics, and consistency models. Ability to reason about eventual consistency, distributed transactions, and data durability guarantees. Experience designing systems that maintain correctness across database failures and network partitions."}
- {"name":"System Reliability and Correctness","description":"Deep judgment in reasoning about correctness, failure modes, and recovery strategies in distributed systems. Experience with monitoring, observability, and auditing practices. Ability to design systems that fail gracefully and provide clear verification of their behavior for compliance purposes."}

### experience

- {"name":"Backend Systems Engineering at Scale","description":"Typically 8+ years of professional experience building and operating backend systems serving millions of users or processing terabyte-scale data volumes. Track record of ownership spanning the full lifecycle from design through production operation."}
- {"name":"Complex Systems Design Leadership","description":"Proven track record leading the design of complex distributed systems and driving multi-quarter initiatives across multiple engineering teams to successful completion. Evidence of turning ambiguous requirements into clear technical specifications and rallying stakeholders around architectural decisions."}
- {"name":"Cross-Functional Technical Leadership","description":"Demonstrated ability to communicate complex technical concepts to non-engineering stakeholders including product, legal, compliance, and security teams. Track record of successfully translating policy and regulatory requirements into technical requirements and implementation plans."}

## Skills

### required

- {"name":"Distributed Systems Design","description":"Expert-level capability designing fault-tolerant distributed systems with complex failure modes. Deep understanding of consensus algorithms, replication strategies, and handling partial failures in microservice architectures."}
- {"name":"Backend Programming Languages","description":"Production mastery of Go, Java, Scala, or similar statically-typed systems languages. Ability to write high-performance, maintainable code and make language-appropriate architectural decisions."}
- {"name":"System Architecture and Design","description":"Ability to make foundational architectural decisions for large-scale systems, considering scalability, reliability, cost, and operational complexity. Experience with designing systems serving millions of users or handling petabyte-scale data."}
- {"name":"Database and Data System Expertise","description":"Deep knowledge of relational databases (PostgreSQL, MySQL, Oracle), NoSQL systems (Cassandra, DynamoDB, MongoDB), and message queues (Kafka). Understanding of consistency guarantees, replication, and failure recovery in each category."}
- {"name":"Cross-Functional Communication","description":"Exceptional written and verbal communication skills to translate between technical and non-technical stakeholders. Ability to distill complex system behavior into clear, actionable insights for Legal, Privacy, Security, and compliance partners."}
- {"name":"Requirement Decomposition","description":"Talent for taking ambiguous, high-level requirements from non-technical stakeholders and decomposing them into clear technical specifications. Ability to ask clarifying questions that expose hidden complexity and tradeoffs early."}

### preferred

- {"name":"Data Privacy and Governance Experience","description":"Prior experience building systems that enforce data privacy, governance, or compliance requirements. Familiarity with GDPR, CCPA, or other regulatory frameworks and their technical implications for data handling."}
- {"name":"Data Deletion and Verification Systems","description":"Experience designing verifiable data deletion mechanisms, ensuring consumers can request deletion and systems can prove deletion has occurred. Knowledge of challenges in proving deletion across replicated data stores and backup systems."}
- {"name":"Data Cataloging and Classification Systems","description":"Experience building or operating data catalogs, data lineage tracking, or data classification systems that help organizations understand their data assets and enforce data governance policies."}
- {"name":"Data Consent and Restriction Enforcement","description":"Experience building systems that enforce data-use restrictions and consent requirements, ensuring data can only be accessed or used in permitted ways. Familiarity with consent management platforms and policy enforcement engines."}
- {"name":"Compliance and Audit Systems","description":"Experience building systems that provide auditability and compliance verification. Familiarity with designing systems that can prove their behavior meets regulatory requirements through logs, traces, and other evidence."}
- {"name":"Fintech or Financial Services Domain Knowledge","description":"Prior experience in fintech, banking, or financial services industries. Understanding of the financial ecosystem, regulatory environment (SOX, PCI-DSS, banking regulations), and data handling requirements in this sector."}

## Tech stack

### tools

- {"name":"Kubernetes","description":"Container orchestration platform for deploying and operating governance platform services at scale. Enables service scaling, rolling updates, and multi-region deployments."}
- {"name":"Prometheus and Grafana","description":"Monitoring and observability stack for tracking governance system health, compliance violations, deletion success rates, and system performance metrics."}
- {"name":"Git and CI/CD Pipelines","description":"Version control and continuous integration/deployment infrastructure for managing governance platform code, enabling safe deployments with automated testing and rollback capabilities."}
- {"name":"Docker","description":"Containerization platform for packaging governance services with consistent runtime environments across development, testing, and production environments."}

### others

- {"name":"Distributed Tracing","description":"Tools like Jaeger or Zipkin for tracing data flows and governance control evaluations across multiple services. Essential for debugging complex governance scenarios and providing auditability evidence."}
- {"name":"Data Lineage Tracking","description":"Techniques and systems for tracking how data flows through Plaid's platform, including which systems touch data, transformation rules applied, and retention policies. Foundational for governance platform decisions."}
- {"name":"Event-Driven Architecture Patterns","description":"Event sourcing and CQRS patterns for building governance systems that maintain auditability, enabling reconstruction of governance state at any point in time. Critical for compliance verification."}
- {"name":"API Design and REST/gRPC Standards","description":"Designing governance APIs that enable other teams to integrate with governance controls. Strong API design ensures the platform can scale to governance thousands of services reliably."}

### databases

- {"name":"PostgreSQL","description":"Relational database for storing governance metadata, data classifications, deletion requests, and audit logs. Suitable for governance state that requires ACID guarantees and complex querying."}
- {"name":"DynamoDB or Cassandra","description":"NoSQL distributed databases for high-throughput governance operations like deletion tracking across multiple regions. Strong horizontal scalability and fault tolerance characteristics."}
- {"name":"Elasticsearch","description":"Search and analytics engine for querying governance audit logs, data lineage information, and compliance verification evidence. Enables efficient investigation and compliance reporting."}
- {"name":"Redis","description":"In-memory data store for governance caching, rate limiting governance operations, and maintaining governance state that requires sub-millisecond access patterns."}

### languages

- {"name":"Go","description":"Preferred backend language for building high-performance, concurrent distributed systems. Strong fit for building system components that prioritize clarity, maintainability, and goroutine-based concurrency patterns."}
- {"name":"Java","description":"Enterprise-grade backend language with mature ecosystem for building distributed systems. Rich libraries for concurrency, systems programming, and large-scale infrastructure. JVM provides strong performance guarantees."}
- {"name":"Scala","description":"Functional programming language on the JVM suitable for building scalable, fault-tolerant systems. Strong for systems that need to express complex data transformations and stream processing logic."}
- {"name":"Python","description":"Supporting language for data analysis, system monitoring, scripting, and infrastructure automation. Useful for building governance policy tooling and data lineage analysis utilities."}

### frameworks

- {"name":"gRPC","description":"High-performance RPC framework for inter-service communication. Enables efficient service-to-service calls with strong schema compatibility and performance suitable for governance platform operations."}
- {"name":"Kafka Streams","description":"Stream processing framework for building governance event processing pipelines. Useful for tracking data flows, enforcement rule evaluation, and audit event streaming across the platform."}
- {"name":"Apache Spark","description":"Large-scale data processing framework for building batch data governance jobs, including data discovery, lineage analysis, and impact assessment across Plaid's data ecosystem."}
- {"name":"Spring Boot","description":"Java microservices framework commonly used for building backend services in enterprise environments. Provides foundation for building governance platform components with REST APIs and service orchestration."}

## Benefits

### benefits

- {"name":"Comprehensive Health Coverage","description":"Medical, dental, and vision insurance plans with competitive premiums and coverage options designed to support employee wellbeing and that of their dependents."}
- {"name":"401(k) Retirement Plan","description":"Company-sponsored 401(k) retirement savings plan, enabling employees to save for long-term financial security with potential company matching contributions."}
- {"name":"Equity Compensation","description":"Stock option grants providing employees with ownership stakes in Plaid's future success. Equity compensation aligns employee and company interests and enables wealth building for long-term contributors."}
- {"name":"Flexible Work Environment","description":"Work arrangement flexibility supporting productivity and work-life balance. Plaid supports distributed teams and provides flexibility to structure work in ways that maximize effectiveness."}
- {"name":"Professional Development","description":"Investment in ongoing learning including conference attendance, training programs, and internal education initiatives. Strong commitment to leveling up technical skills and leadership capability across the organization."}
- {"name":"Inclusive Workplace Culture","description":"Commitment to building a diverse, equitable, and inclusive workplace. Plaid actively recruits and supports underrepresented groups in technology and provides resources for belonging and community."}

## Compensation

- **max:** 320000
- **min:** 220000
- **currency:** USD
- **stockOptions:** true

## Interview process

### steps

- {"name":"Initial Screening and Technical Discussion","description":"Conversation with recruiter or hiring manager to understand your background in distributed systems, governance or compliance domain experience, and general interest in the role. Expect discussion around your most complex systems work and technical decision-making process."}
- {"name":"Technical System Design Interview","description":"Deep-dive discussion with an engineering leader on designing a large-scale distributed system with governance requirements. You'll be asked to architect solutions to complex problems similar to those in the role, discuss tradeoffs, failure modes, and how you'd verify correctness."}
- {"name":"Code Review and Implementation Exercise","description":"Hands-on exercise reviewing or implementing governance system components. You may be asked to optimize existing code, design a data structure for tracking deletions, or implement a compliance verification algorithm. Focus on correctness, readability, and consideration of edge cases."}
- {"name":"Cross-Functional Collaboration Discussion","description":"Conversation with non-engineering stakeholders (Legal, Privacy, Security, or Product) to assess communication skill with non-technical partners. Discuss how you'd translate regulatory requirements into technical specifications and handle conflicting stakeholder needs."}
- {"name":"Leadership and Impact Panel","description":"Conversation with multiple senior engineers and leadership discussing your approach to technical leadership, mentorship, and driving large initiatives. Focus on examples of ambiguous problems you've clarified, teams you've leveled up, and initiatives you've delivered end-to-end."}

## 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, Washington D.C., London and Amsterdam.

The Data Governance team makes sure Plaid handles consumer and customer data responsibly — and can prove it. Our mission is to enforce Plaid's privacy commitments and regulatory obligations in the systems themselves rather than in policy documents: we build the platform and controls that govern how data flows through Plaid — where it lives, who can use it, for what purpose, and for how long. That includes verifiable deletion of consumer data on request, enforcement of data-use restrictions so downstream systems can only use data in permitted ways, and the cataloging and classification that let Plaid know what data it holds and how sensitive it is. We operate at the scale of Plaid's entire data footprint, and correctness and auditability matter to us as much as throughput.

As a Staff Software Engineer on Data Governance, you will set the technical direction for how Plaid enforces data governance at scale. You'll lead the design of distributed backend systems that reliably delete, restrict, and track data across dozens of services, making architectural decisions whose blast radius spans the whole company. You'll drive multi-quarter initiatives from ambiguous privacy and regulatory requirements through to shipped, auditable infrastructure — decomposing the hard problems, aligning multiple engineering teams behind a plan, and staying hands-on in the code for the highest-risk pieces. You'll be a force multiplier: raising the technical bar through design reviews and mentorship, and partnering deeply with Legal, Privacy, Security, and product-engineering teams to turn obligations into controls the rest of the company can build on.

**Responsibilities**

* Own the technical architecture for Plaid's data-governance platform
* Lead the design and delivery of multi-quarter, cross-team initiatives.
* Drive design reviews and set engineering standards for reliability, correctness, and auditability across the team's systems.
* Partner with Legal, Privacy, Security, and product-engineering teams to shape requirements and unblock adoption of governance controls company-wide.
* Mentor engineers and level up the team's technical judgment; act as a technical point of contact for governance concerns raised by other teams.

**Qualifications**

Must-haves:

* Extensive experience (typically 8+ years) building and operating backend distributed systems at scale, in a language like Go, Java, or similar.
* A track record of leading the design of complex systems and driving cross-team technical initiatives to completion.
* Strong fundamentals in data stores, consistency, and reliability, with the judgment to reason about correctness and failure modes.
* Demonstrated ability to turn ambiguous requirements into clear technical plans and align multiple stakeholders behind them.
* Excellent written and verbal communication, including working effectively with non-engineering partners (legal, privacy, compliance).

Nice-to-have:

* Prior experience with data privacy, governance, or compliance systems (e.g., GDPR/CCPA deletion, data-use/consent enforcement, cataloging/classification, or auditing).

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.