Jobs / United States / Plaid INC
Senior Machine Learning Engineer - Fraud
Plaid INC · 🇺🇸 San Francisco HQ; Seattle Office; 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 roles2 certified filings for “Senior Machine Learning Engineer” (Data Scientists) in NY: $170k–$226k, median $198k. Most were filed at wage level IV (100%) — 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.
Or apply yourself on the official page →
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 Fraud Data team at Plaid builds the machine learning systems that power Plaid’s fraud detection products, leveraging insights from across Plaid’s network to help identify and stop fraud before it happens. Our team works across the full data science and machine learning lifecycle—from discovering new signals and experimenting with models to deploying and optimizing them in production. We continuously learn from real-world model performance and customer feedback to improve our systems and develop new ways to protect customers and consumers from evolving fraud threats. As a Senior Machine Learning Engineer on Plaid's Fraud Data team, you will develop models that improve fraud detection for our customers. You will identify predictive patterns in Plaid's network data and lead projects from initial experiments through model deployment and ongoing improvement. - Investigate fraud patterns and model errors to identify new signals, improve detection, and expand coverage across customers and use cases. - Develop training datasets and predictive features, addressing challenges such as incomplete labels, class imbalance, data leakage, and changing fraud behavior. - Design, train, and tune models using traditional and modern ML methods, including gradient-boosted trees and neural networks, and evaluate newer architectures against existing approaches. - Design experiments to test features and models, comparing performance across time periods and customer segments using agreed detection and false-positive metrics. - Build data and training pipelines that support reproducible experiments and efficient iteration on features and models. - Deploy models with Engineering and ML Infrastructure partners, balancing detection quality, latency, cost, and reliability. - Independently lead ML projects, agreeing on priorities and evaluation metrics with Data Science and Product and coordinating work through model release. Responsibilities: - Build hands-on machine learning expertise across the full ML lifecycle, from feature engineering and experimentation to model deployment. - Take models from initial experimentation through production and evaluate their impact using real-world customer outcomes. - Develop experience building and scaling reliable ML systems in production. - Explore how LLMs and Generative AI can improve fraud detection, prevention, and investigation. - Accelerate your career in a fast-paced environment with opportunities to take ownership, solve complex problems, and make a meaningful impact. Qualifications: - 7+ years of professional experience in machine learning, applied science, or software engineering for ML, including hands-on model development and deployment. - Hands-on experience designing, training, tuning, and deploying models, and measuring improvements in production performance or business metrics. - Strong ML and statistical fundamentals, including feature engineering, experiment design, model evaluatio