Staff Software Engineer - Security Infrastructure

Plaid is a company dedicated to empowering financial interactions through innovative tools and experiences. The Staff Software Engineer - Security Infrastructure will be responsible for defining industry standards in security, building centralized authorization platforms, and enhancing security capabilities across the organization.

Responsibilities:

• Design & Code: Write high-quality, scalable code to enhance product security or support security functions
• Architect: Lead the technical design of complex, cross-functional security systems. You will determine how we solve problems like 'universal service-to-service authentication' or 'global data encryption' at scale
• Consult & Embed: Act as a security subject matter expert for other engineering teams. We embed within engineering teams to build and accelerate security features within our products and frameworks
• Operate: Own your systems in production. We run an on-call rotation for the services we build, ensuring they meet the same high availability standards as our core products
• Innovate: Contribute to the broader security industry. Whether it's open-sourcing our internal tools or contributing to major open-source security projects, we want you to help move the industry forward

Requirements:

• Strong Software Engineering skills: You have 8+ years of experience building distributed systems, backend services, or infrastructure. You care about code quality, testing, and reliability
• You are 'security-curious': You understand the fundamentals of security (encryption, auth protocols like OIDC/OAuth, network security) and want to dive deeper. You ask 'how can we design this so it can't be misused?' rather than just 'is this bug fixed?'
• You think at a system-level: You can visualize complex dependencies and design solutions that work across dozens of microservices
• You are a Partner: You can communicate complex security requirements to product managers and engineers with empathy and clarity