Staff Software Engineer

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
• Consumer Experience

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.

Responsibilities

• Set technical direction across Europe's product surface area, translating product strategy into clear engineering roadmaps with crisp scoping, sequencing, and tradeoffs.
• Stay hands-on—owning high-leverage projects, spiking and prototyping to de-risk, or going deep on the hardest parts of projects others own, depending on the quarter.
• Own technical excellence for the team—setting and holding a high bar through design reviews, architectural decisions, and code quality.
• Partner closely with the EM and PM to identify opportunities, make tradeoffs, and keep the team focused on the highest-leverage work.
• Maintain a strong connection to US engineering and platform teams, ensuring Europe's requirements shape platform decisions and the team leverages shared infrastructure rather than building in isolation.