Engineering Manager - Intelligent Tooling

Engineering
San Francisco
Full-time
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We build simple yet innovative consumer products and developer APIs that shape how everybody interacts with money and the financial system.
Plaid is evolving into an AI-first company, and Intelligent Tooling sits at the center of that transformation. The Intelligent Tooling team is being built from the ground up, and our mission is to establish the technical foundations, operating model, and internal platforms that embed AI deeply into Plaid’s coding tools, internal systems, and the entire software development lifecycle.

When we are successful, engineers across Plaid will delegate lower-leverage work to AI agents, move faster with confidence, and spend more of their time designing and inventing for customers. Intelligent Tooling owns the platforms and systems that make this possible - from AI coding integrations and SDLC agents to the internal tools that power Plaid’s operations.

As the Engineering Manager for Intelligent Tooling, you will lead an engineering team responsible for some of the highest-leverage systems at Plaid. This role is central to executing Plaid’s 2026 engineering strategy to supercharge the engineering organization with AI tooling, and requires a leader who can both build the team and personally operate at the frontier of AI-powered developer workflows to drive real, organization-wide change.

You will set direction, drive execution, and critically, ensure adoption of AI-powered tools that improve how hundreds of engineers build, test, debug, and operate software every day. This is not a research role: success is measured by real usage, real impact, and real improvements to developer experience.

Responsibilities

  • Build and grow the Intelligent Tooling engineering team from the ground up, including hiring, setting early technical direction, and establishing team culture and operating norms.
  • Develop, integrate, and own Plaid’s AI-powered developer tooling and internal platforms, including AI coding tools, agentic workflows, and AI-native SDLC automation.
  • Take ownership of existing internal tooling platforms (e.g. Retool, Wadsworth, ID2), ensuring clear ownership, reliable operations, and steady improvements to developer experience.
  • Drive organization-wide adoption of AI tooling by embedding AI directly into core engineering workflows such as coding, testing, debugging, and incident response.
  • Partner closely with DevEff, Security, Privacy, Legal, and other cross-functional partners to ensure AI tooling is safe, compliant, scalable, and aligned with Plaid’s standards.
  • Define and execute against clear success metrics (e.g. usage, quality, reliability) to measure the real impact of Intelligent Tooling across the engineering organization.

Qualifications

  • 8–10+ years of engineering experience, including time as an IC building production systems.
  • 3+ years of experience managing and scaling engineering teams.
  • Demonstrated success driving adoption of new tools or workflows, ideally AI-powered, for their own team. 
  • Hands-on experience with AI coding tools, agentic workflows, or LLM-powered developer systems.
  • Strong technical judgment with depth in at least one of: developer tooling / DX platforms, infrastructure or platform engineering, or applied AI systems in production.
  • Experience translating ambiguous strategy into execution and delivering measurable outcomes.
  • Excellent communication and stakeholder management skills.
  • [Nice to have] Proven experience leading internal platforms or developer tooling with broad adoption across an engineering organization.
  • [Nice to have] Prior ownership of internal platforms with reliability and SLOs, supporting a large internal engineering audience.
  • [Nice to have] Experience partnering with security, privacy, legal, or other governance functions on AI-related systems.
$214,800.00 - $366,000.00 per year

The target base salary for this position ranges from $214,800/year to $366,000/year in Zone 1. The target base salary will vary based on the job's location. 

Our geographic zones are as follows:
Zone 1 - New York City and San Francisco Bay Area 
Zone 2 - Los Angeles, Seattle, Washington D.C.
Zone 3 - Austin, Boston, Denver, Houston, Portland, Sacramento, San Diego
Zone 4 - Raleigh-Durham and all other US cities

Additional compensation in the form(s) of equity and/or commission are dependent on the position offered. Plaid provides a comprehensive benefit plan, including medical, dental, vision, and 401(k). Pay is based on factors such as (but not limited to) scope and responsibilities of the position, candidate's work experience and skillset, and location. Pay and benefits are subject to change at any time, consistent with the terms of any applicable compensation or benefit plans.

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