Welcome to the Plaid Blog
November 19, 2020
How we built developer efficiency at Plaid
For the longest time, Plaid was a company with just a few engineers primarily focusing on the product and execution. Everyone was working on the product to create...
October 22, 2020
How Plaid parses transaction data
At Plaid, we link financial accounts to applications, removing the need for our customers to build individual connections to financial institutions and standardizing the data that’s...
September 30, 2020
Building a spiky org
A few months ago, I spoke on the SFELC podcast (Part I , Part II ) on my experience as an engineering leader at Plaid....
September 09, 2020
Reducing docker images' size
At Plaid, all 80+ internal services operate as Docker containers. Containers are deployed; they are built and spawned locally during CI runs. Finally, developers use containers during their...
July 23, 2020
Remote at Plaid
Engineering Manager April Goldman-Sims Shares Plaid Engineering’s Approach to Remote Work COVID has forced us to reimagine what "work" means to us. I've been working as...
June 09, 2020
How we migrated our website from Handlebars to React in 12 weeks
TL;DR: We built an automated tool that let us incrementally migrate, while keeping up regular feature work and maintenance. As a company, Plaid has reached critical...
April 09, 2020
Securing WebViews with Chrome Custom Tabs
Plaid empowers innovators in the fintech space by providing them with access to financial data via a uniform API. In order to help end users connect their...
January 22, 2020
2019 State of Diversity & Inclusion in Plaid Engineering
Building amazing products that power thousands of fintech apps requires us on the Plaid engineering team to empathize with the developers and end users who build and use...
December 19, 2019
Benefits of writing our own application bootloader
There's a lot of variability in Plaid's 75+ internal services. Most of our services are written in Go, TypeScript, and Python. They can communicate with each other synchronously...
December 13, 2019
How we 30x'd our Node parallelism
What's the best way to safely increase parallelism in a production Node service? That's a question my team needed to answer a couple of months ago. We...
August 28, 2019
How we reduced deployment times by 95%
As Plaid grows, so does the scale of our infrastructure. We currently run over 20 internal services and deploy over 50 code commits per day across our...
June 24, 2019
Welcome, Summer 2019 Plinterns!
The Plintern team from left to right: Lujing Cen, Sarafina Smith, Jennifer McCleary, Andrew Chen, Owen Gillespie, Jarrod Dunne, Eric Fortney (not pictured) Summer is officially...
June 21, 2019
How we stopped memory intensive queries from crashing ElasticSearch
At Plaid , we make heavy use of Amazon-hosted ElasticSearch for real time log analysis — everything from finding the root cause of production errors to analyzing the lifecycle of...
May 31, 2019
Finding the right fit: How Plaid reconciles pending and posted transactions
Plaid's API helps developers provide financial services to tens of millions of consumers across North America. These services help consumers manage their personal finances, let them transfer funds...
April 23, 2019
Growing our team with retrospectives
In my years in tech and leadership, one thing I have learned about myself is that I hate telling people what to do. That might sound weird coming...
