Security Engineer, GRC

📋 Job Overview

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.

🏢 About Plaid

The Security Governance, Risk, and Compliance (GRC) team is part of Plaid’s security organization, focused on enabling the business by proactively managing information security risks and maintaining effective controls. Our mission is to reduce the likelihood and impact of security risks while operating a robust assurance program that builds trust with our customers, consumers, and data partners. We own Plaid’s security compliance frameworks, run our audits and risk programs, and partner across the company to keep Plaid’s platform secure, resilient, and aligned with industry and regulatory expectations. GRC Engineering is how we make all of that scale — turning compliance into code, evidence into telemetry, and audits into a continuous, automated capability.

🎯 The Role

You will own GRC Engineering at Plaid — a foundational, high-ownership role defining an emerging discipline from the ground up. Today most of our compliance work is manual and point-in-time; you will turn it into an engineered system that is continuous, data-driven, and scalable, and set the technical direction for the field.

✅ Key Responsibilities

• Architect GRC's Engineering Foundation: Build the pipelines and codified source of truth the function runs on — controls, policies, and framework mappings captured as structured, version-controlled data and fed by live control and system state — so one control maps evidence across SOC 2, ISO, NIST, and beyond instead of being re-collected for every audit.
• Build Continuous Controls Monitoring: Automate evidence collection, control testing, and monitoring across cloud and internal systems, and write and tune the detection that flags drift and misconfiguration against baseline — so audit readiness is continuous and gaps surface the moment they appear, not at audit time.
• Turn Data into Risk Signal: Build dashboards and SQL-driven reporting that turn raw control and risk data into KPIs, giving the team and leadership real-time visibility into risk posture.
• Drive Data-Informed Risk Assessments: Conduct security and technology risk assessments and recommend mitigations using data — keeping the risk management program running while cutting its manual overhead.
• Automate Operational Toil: Eliminate the recurring manual work the team carries — evidence pulls, access and vendor reviews, questionnaires, risk-register upkeep, status reporting — with durable automation that gives time back across every workstream.
• Shift Compliance Left with Code and AI: Embed compliance checks into the CI/CD flow as policy-as-code so controls are validated as code ships, prototype self-healing policies reconciled against live infrastructure, and scale agentic / AI-assisted workflows across the function.
• Future-proof for Continuous Compliance: Build toward machine-readable, continuously validated evidence (FedRAMP 20x-style Key Security Indicators), positioning Plaid to meet continuous-compliance expectations as we enter new markets and pursue new opportunities.

📌 Required Qualifications

• You think in systems: you'd rather design the thing that eliminates a whole class of manual work than automate one task at a time.
• You love building and shipping internal tools and solutions that people actually use.
• You're relentlessly curious — you poke, you investigate, and you dig into how controls can silently fail, drift, or get bypassed so you can catch it automatically.
• You treat every roadblock as just an obstacle to route around — you don't back down, because there's always a path.
• You like range — juggling several problems across security, risk, compliance, and engineering beats grinding on a single one.
• You're energized by turning compliance from a documentation exercise into demonstrable, continuous, machine-readable evidence.

🎁 Benefits

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.

🛂 Visa & Eligibility

No visa or eligibility information provided.