Job Description

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.
The Earned Wage Access (EWA) team is building Plaid's industry-leading solution for assessing repayment risk in EWA. By leveraging Plaid's unique data and modeling capabilities, the team aims to deliver the most accurate and scalable EWA score in the market-surpassing existing offerings and setting a new standard for how partners evaluate and manage risk in this emerging space.
As a Data Scientist on the EWA team, you'll work across the full product lifecycle-from pre-launch evaluation through post-launch retrospectives-to analyze performance, assess repayment patterns, and design strategies that optimize outcomes for partners and end users. You'll refine Plaid's EWA risk models, identifying opportunities to improve predictive accuracy and uncover new behavioral signals unique to EWA users. In this role, you'll also develop new features to strengthen risk prediction, build scalable data pipelines with tools like dbt to automate ETL processes, and create metrics, alerts, and dashboards to continuously monitor production model performance.
Responsibilities

• Shape Plaid's first zero-to-one repayment risk framework for earned wage access, setting a new industry standard.
• Empower millions of workers with safer, more accessible EWA products by helping partners manage repayment risk responsibly.
• Dive deep into Plaid's unique transaction and balance data to uncover new repayment risk signals.
• Partner closely with customers to conduct retros and design repayment strategies, demonstrating real-world impact.
• Experiment with new modeling approaches and features tailored for short-term liquidity and repayment behavior.
• Build dashboards and monitoring frameworks that bring transparency to repayment risk and model performance.
• Collaborate across product, engineering, and data teams to scale Plaid's EWA risk solutions and improve product-market fit.
• Join a high-ownership, bottom-up driven team building the leading EWA score to surpass competitors in the space.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of experience in applied analytics, decision science, or risk modeling, ideally within credit, lending, or payments.
• Strong ability to analyze and interpret large-scale financial datasets (transactions, balances, repayment behaviors) to generate insights.
• Proficiency in SQL, Python, and data visualization/analysis tool.
• Experience in model performance evaluation, monitoring, and feature development for credit or risk models.
• Ability to partner with customers and internal stakeholders to translate data insights into repayment strategies and product improvements.
• A track record of owning projects end-to-end and driving measurable business or customer impact.
• Familiarity with financial services, fintech, or EWA/payroll products is a strong plus.
• Advanced degree or equivalent work experience in Statistics, Economics, Mathematics, Data Science, or a related field.

$174,000 - $260,400 a year
The target base salary for this position ranges from $174,000/year to $260,400/year in Zone 1. The target base salary will vary based on the job's location.
Our geographic zones are as follows:
Zone 1 - New York City and San Francisco Bay Area
Zone 2 - Los Angeles, Seattle, Washington D.C.
Zone 3 - Austin, Boston, Denver, Houston, Portland, Sacramento, San Diego
Zone 4 - Raleigh-Durham and all other US cities
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 .

Skills Required