Staff Software Engineer - Data Governance

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 i