Staff Product Manager - AI Foundations

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, Seattle, Washington D.C., Raleigh, London, and Amsterdam. Plaid’s Product team builds the network that powers the future of financial services. Our mission is to unlock financial freedom for everyone through open finance. Product Managers at Plaid are curious, customer-obsessed, and move quickly to deliver value. They take ownership, sweat the details, and make sound decisions with imperfect information.   As a Product Manager on the AI Foundations team, you will drive Plaid’s AI strategy by building the data and intelligence layer that powers smarter financial experiences. You will work across engineering, data science, and research to develop scalable AI systems—from core embeddings and representation learning to applied model integrations that enhance developer and consumer outcomes.   This role is for an experienced PM who thrives at the intersection of AI and platform products. You are technically fluent, strategic, and execution-oriented. You enjoy turning advanced machine-learning capabilities into reliable, trusted infrastructure that scales across Plaid’s ecosystem. Responsibilities - AI & Data Foundations Strategy: Define the vision, roadmap, and success metrics for the shared platforms that power data and AI development across Plaid. - Platform Development: Partner with data, ML, and platform engineers to design and ship foundational capabilities spanning AI infrastructure, developer tooling, data platforms, pipelines, quality, and governance. - Internal Developer Experience & Adoption: Build platforms that Plaid teams choose to use. Develop a deep understanding of internal users, remove friction from common workflows, and measure success through adoption, developer velocity, reliability, and quality. - Platform Evolution: Balance immediate needs from product teams with longer-term platform investments, identifying where Plaid should standardize, build shared primitives, or enable experimentation. - Cross-Functional Leadership: Partner with product, engineering, data, research, and security to identify shared needs and embed foundational AI and data capabilities across Plaid. - Communication & Alignment: Translate complex technical decisions and platform trade-offs into clear narratives that enable decisions across technical and non-technical stakeholders. Qualifications - 8+ years of product management experience including direct experience building AI/ML platform systems, applied intelligence products, or other data infrastructure from concept to production - Deep technical fluency in modern data and AI/ML systems, including how data is stored and processed and how models are developed, evaluated, deployed, and monitored. You can engage deeply with engineers and data scientists on architecture and technical trade-offs without needing to be the engineer in the room. - Platform mindset and experience building scalable developer or data platforms through well-designed primitives, APIs, and frameworks. - Strategic and executional range. Skilled at setting the long-term vision while also delivering near-term experiments, specs, prototypes, and launches. - Strong communicator and cross-functional leader who can translate complex technical concepts into clear narratives to drive decisions for technical and non-technical stakeholders. - Commitment to responsible AI and transparency, especially in regulated or high-trust domains. - [Nice to Have] Hands-on experience with LLMs, embeddings, or agentic systems in production. - [Nice to Have] Experience building AI developer tooling in production. - [Nice to Have] Familiarity with applied AI in regulated or high-trust domains such as fintech, identity, or risk. 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