Engineering Manager - Security

San Francisco, California, United StatesHybridFull TimeManager / HeadPosted 2 months agoVisa sponsorship available

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Role summary

Plaid is seeking an Engineering Manager for Security Engineering to lead a team responsible for building and operating the core security infrastructure that enables secure development across the company. This role involves partnering with the CISO and engineering leaders to define and drive the roadmap for platform capabilities, ensuring reliability and adoption. The ideal candidate is a technically credible leader who can deeply engage with engineers and translate complex security concepts into pragmatic, risk-based decisions aligned with business goals. The team owns secure paved roads for encryption, authentication/authorization, CI/CD, data, and network security.

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.

We build the security foundation that every engineer at Plaid depends on. The Security Engineering team is responsible for building, scaling, and evolving the core security infrastructure that enables Plaid's product engineering teams to ship securely and at speed. We own the secure paved roads across encryption, authN/authZ, CI/CD, data, and network security surfaces, abstracting away security complexity so developers can build at velocity with confidence. Our mission is simple: make the secure path the easy path for every engineer at Plaid.

As the Engineering Manager for Security Engineering, you will lead a team of security engineers building and operating the foundational capabilities that underpin secure development across Plaid. You will partner closely with the CISO and cross-functional engineering leaders to define and drive the roadmap for our platform capabilities, while ensuring our paved roads are reliable, well-adopted, and continuously maturing. You're a technically credible leader who earns the trust of your engineers by going deep, and earns the trust of the business by translating complex security tradeoffs into pragmatic, risk-based decisions that align with Plaid's product goals.

Responsibilities:

Lead, mentor, and grow a team of security engineers, fostering a high-performance, collaborative, and psychologically safe team culture

Own the technical roadmap and strategic direction for Plaid's core security capabilities across encryption, authN/authZ, CI/CD, data, and network security surfaces to secure Plaid’s AI and MCP ecosystem (internal and external MCP integrations).

Partner with product and platform engineering teams to deeply understand their needs, and deliver self-service security infrastructure that scales across teams at varying levels of security maturity.

Partner with Data Foundation and AI teams to build secure paved roads for agentic identities and workflows (AI agents, MCP clients, service identities)

Drive measurable improvement in secure-by-default adoption across Plaid's engineering organization, leading with influence rather than authority

Make pragmatic, risk-based security decisions and tradeoffs that are consistent with product roadmaps and business objectives

Represent the team's work and security posture clearly to Staff-level leaders including the CISO, CTO, and COO

Actively build team stability and strong team dynamics, playing a significant role in hiring, onboarding, growing, and retaining security engineering talent

Qualifications:

8–14 years of overall software engineering experience, with ~6+ years of that in engineering management roles

Strong technical background in software engineering, with the ability to understand, evaluate, and guide work on auth systems, encryption, identity/access services, and related security domains in an AWS and K8s environment

Experience managing engineers in a security, platform, or infrastructure context

Experience designing and securing AI/ML/Agentic platforms (tool-calling, MCPs, and service identities)

Familiarity with AI security and governance risks and control designs that preserve developer velocity.

Proven track record building scalable platform capabilities and paved roads used broadly across a product focused engineering organization

Ability to architect security capabilities and controls with developer experience principles in mind

Strong cross-functional relationship-building skills, operating effectively as both a technical advisor and a delivery partner to product engineering teams

High-empathy communication skills, with the ability to represent technical work to senior leadership

Internal customer focus, with the ability to drive security maturity gains through influence rather than authority

Experience at a fintech or high-technology organization adjacent to payments or financial services

Hands-on experience building user and service authN/authZ capabilities, encryption/secrets management services, or internal identity management capabilities at scale at an AWS and K8s environment

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.

Sample Plaid interview questions

1
Design a language translation platform that works in real-time.
system designmedium
2
Design a system for storing and serving images/videos.
system designmedium
3
Use documentation to query their API and collect some data.
technicalaverage
4
Is this window function performant?
technicaldifficult
5
What is the syntax to make a private variable in JavaScript?
technicalaverage

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