Engineering Manager - Security

Plaid•San Francisco, CA

About The Position

We believe that the way people interact with their finances will drastically improve in the next few years. Weâre 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. Plaidâs 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.

Requirements

8â14 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

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 Plaidâs 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

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