Jobs / United States / Plaid INC
Staff Software Engineer - Data Governance
Plaid INC · 🇺🇸 San Francisco HQ; New York City Office
Sponsorship verdict
Sponsorship possible
One solid signal, not two — worth applying, and worth asking about sponsorship early.
- Employer is on a government sponsor recordThe US Department of Labor certified 27 H-1B/E-3 labor condition applications for this employer between Oct 2025 and Jun 2026 (latest Jun 2026) — the step every H-1B hire needs first. USCIS also records 9 H-1B approvals in FY2023. Source: LCA disclosure data (US Department of Labor (OFLC)).
- The posting doesn’t mention sponsorshipSilence isn’t a refusal — ask the recruiter before investing much time.
- No salary bar for this routeH-1B has no fixed salary bar: the employer must pay at least the prevailing wage for the role and area. Cap-subject employers enter a lottery weighted by wage level. Source: https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2025/12/29/2025-23853/weighted-selection-process-for-registrants-and-petitioners-seeking-to-file-cap-subject-h-1b, rules effective 2026-02-27.
- What Plaid INC paid sponsored hires in similar roles4 certified filings for “Senior Software Engineer” (Software Developers) in NY: $190k–$191k, median $190k. Most were filed at wage level IV (75%) — 4 lottery entries, ≈61% projected selection odds for cap-subject employers. Source: US Department of Labor LCA disclosure data (Oct 2025 – Jun 2026).
- Confirmed live todayWhen a source last listed this job as open.
US H-1B: cap-subject employers enter a lottery weighted by wage level — Level I gets 1 entry, Level IV gets 4 (DHS projected selection odds ≈15% at Level I to ≈61% at Level IV). Universities and non-profit research employers are cap-exempt. The $100,000 fee for new petitions from abroad is currently blocked by a court order (appeal pending).
A verdict summarises public evidence; it is not legal advice and never a guarantee — the employer and the immigration authority decide. Sign in to factor in where you can already work.
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Sponsor Radar — Plaid INC
The US Department of Labor certified 27 H-1B/E-3 labor condition applications for this employer between Oct 2025 and Jun 2026 (latest Jun 2026) — the step every H-1B hire needs first. USCIS also records 9 H-1B approvals in FY2023. Source: LCA disclosure data (US Department of Labor (OFLC)).
Past sponsorship or register membership never guarantees sponsorship for this vacancy or for you. Full Sponsor Radar for Plaid INC →
About the role
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. The Data Governance team makes sure Plaid handles consumer and customer data responsibly — and can prove it. Our mission is to enforce Plaid's privacy commitments and regulatory obligations in the systems themselves rather than in policy documents: we build the platform and controls that govern how data flows through Plaid — where it lives, who can use it, for what purpose, and for how long. That includes verifiable deletion of consumer data on request, enforcement of data-use restrictions so downstream systems can only use data in permitted ways, and the cataloging and classification that let Plaid know what data it holds and how sensitive it is. We operate at the scale of Plaid's entire data footprint, and correctness and auditability matter to us as much as throughput. As a Staff Software Engineer on Data Governance, you will set the technical direction for how Plaid enforces data governance at scale. You'll lead the design of distributed backend systems that reliably delete, restrict, and track data across dozens of services, making architectural decisions whose blast radius spans the whole company. You'll drive multi-quarter initiatives from ambiguous privacy and regulatory requirements through to shipped, auditable infrastructure — decomposing the hard problems, aligning multiple engineering teams behind a plan, and staying hands-on in the code for the highest-risk pieces. You'll be a force multiplier: raising the technical bar through design reviews and mentorship, and partnering deeply with Legal, Privacy, Security, and product-engineering teams to turn obligations into controls the rest of the company can build on. Responsibilities - Own the technical architecture for Plaid's data-governance platform - Lead the design and delivery of multi-quarter, cross-team initiatives. - Drive design reviews and set engineering standards for reliability, correctness, and auditability across the team's systems. - Partner with Legal, Privacy, Security, and product-engineering teams to shape requirements and unblock adoption of governance controls company-wide. - Mentor engineers and level up the team's technical judgment; act as a technical point of contact for governance concerns raised by other teams. Qualifications Must-haves: - Extensive experience (typically 8+ years) building and operating backend distributed systems at scale, in a language like Go, Java, or similar. - A track record of leading the design of complex systems and driving cross-team technical initiatives to completion. - Strong fundamentals in data stores, consistency, and reliability, with the judgment to reason about correctness and failure modes. - Demonstrated ability to turn ambiguous requirements into clear technical plans and align multiple stakeholders behind them. - Excellent written and verbal communication, including working effectively with non-engineering partners (legal, privacy, compliance). Nice-to-have: - Prior experience with data priv