Engineering Manager - Intelligent Tooling

Engineering

San Francisco

Full-time

We build simple yet innovative consumer products and developer APIs that shape how everybody interacts with money and the financial system.

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.

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.

$216,000.00 - $367,200.00 per year

The target base salary for this position ranges from $216,000/year to $367,200/year [in Zone 1, in Zone 4 or encompassing all Zones]. The target base salary will vary based on the job's location.

Our geographic zones are as follows:
Zone 1 - San Francisco / New York City / Seattle
Zone 2 - Los Angeles / Washington DC / Austin / Boston / Sacramento / San Diego
Zone 3 - Atlanta / Portland / Chicago / Philadelphia / Denver / Miami / Dallas / Raleigh
Zone 4 - All other US cities

The base salary range listed for this full-time position excludes commission (if applicable), equity and benefits. The pay range shown on each job posting is the minimum and maximum target for new-hire salaries. Actual pay may be higher or lower depending on factors like skills, experience, and relevant education or training.

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.

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