Interesting Data Gigs # 9: Data Engineer - Data Platform at Plaid

Why you must follow the work of Lex Sokolin and Mary Ann Azevedo

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Hi, Data Geeks.

Welcome to the Fintech Edition of Interesting Data Gigs.

Today, I will write about one of my favorite fintech companies out there: Plaid, and we will discuss how to stand out in your application for this very interesting Data Engineering role at Plaid.

But, let me share my excitement with you about Plaid.

If you have had the chance to chat with me about tech, you should know I love the world of APIs, Payments, and Fintech in general:

Why?

Because I believe that the advancements that we are seeing in this field are only starting, and many of these companies are helping to create a fairer financial world. I want to truly believe that.

Plaid is one organization that combines all favorite technology fields under one umbrella:

Infrastructure + Financial Technologies + APIs

But, as always do, let’s discuss what is actually Plaid?

I found a very accurate description of what Plaid does in the document provided by the Department of Justice after they blocked the acquisition of Plaid by Visa (which from my perspective it was the best thing for Plaid):

Plaid powers some of today’s most innovative financial technology (“fintech”) apps, such as Venmo, Acorns, and Betterment. Plaid’s technology allows fintechs to plug into consumers’ various financial accounts, with consumer permission, to aggregate spending data, look up balances, and verify other personal financial information.

Plaid has already built connections to 11,000 U.S. financial institutions and more than 200 million consumer bank accounts in the United States and growing.

These established connections position Plaid to overcome the entry barriers that others face in attempting to provide online debit services.

Visa intended to acquire the company in 2020, but the DOJ blocked the transaction.

But this move proved a lot of things for the Plaid side:

  • The company’s services are in great demand, especially after the cambrian explosion of financial startups in the last two years

  • This allowed the company to have the perfect timing to raise another round of capital ($425 Million Series D), bringing strategic investors to the cap table. In the process, its valuation soared to $13.4 Billion, proving that the company was being undervalued by Visa.

About this new funding, Zach Perret (CEO and co-founder of Plaid) wrote:

Today we’re excited to share that we’ve raised a $425m Series D financing to help scale our platform to support the massive growth in fintech, and enable the next generation of digital financial services. We brought on new investors Altimeter Capital, Silver Lake, and Ribbit Capital who joined existing investors, including Andreessen Horowitz, Index Ventures, Kleiner Perkins, New Enterprise Associates, Spark Capital, and Thrive Capital in this round.

There are very strategic investors in this round with some of them specializing in the financial tech industry and late-stage investments.

  • The company has expanded beyond its core product with some very interesting offers like income verification, identity verification (after Cognito’s acquisition for $250 Million in cash and stock), fraud prevention through Signal and Guarantee products, and much more.

  • Did you know Microsoft’s Money in Excel is supported by Plaid? So cool to know that, but even more interesting is that this is an amazing way to test the capabilities of Plaid’s API

I truly believe that these are exciting times to be part of Plaid.

Anyways, let’s talk about how to stand out for your application as a Data Engineer there.

Let’s discuss some ideas on how to approach this job application (THE REAL MEAT)

1. My first tip? Don’t hit the Apply button

Instead: Make an API call to send your job application (POST https://contact.plaid.com/jobs)

The instructions are very clear:

At Plaid, our API is core to everything we do. In the spirit of our culture, we love receiving job applications as calls to our API.

Submit a POST request to our careers endpoint

Format it as a raw JSON request body

We’ll get back to you with next steps!

I will let you the example here:

{

"name": "Marcos Ortiz",

"email": "[email protected]",

"resume": "https://www.example.com/your-resume.pdf",

"phone": "555-867-5309",

"job_id": "f38dbd8c-d204-4597-8edb-18f5dfc30e2a", // leave as is

"github": "https://github.com/marcosluis2186", // optional

"twitter": "@marcosluis2186", // optional

"website": "https://interestingdatagigs.substack.com", // optional

"location": "Lima", // optional

"favorite_candy": "oreo", // optional

"superpower": "connection builder" // optional

}

How to Apply for this Data Engineer role at Plaid Job Using a POST Request

There are several ways to accomplish this:

  • You can build a simple Python script using the requests module to send the POST request to that particular API endpoint. I wrote a simple example here

  • You can use tools like Postman or Insomnia to send a POST request to that URL with that data. You can view an example here from Maggie

  • The last way to do it could be using curl 

curl -d '{"name":"Marcos Ortiz", "email": "[email protected]", "resume": "https://www.example.com/your-resume.pdf", phone": "555-867-5309", "job_id": "f38dbd8c-d204-4597-8edb-18f5dfc30e2a", "github": "github.com/marcosluis2186", "twitter": "@marcosluis2186", "website": "interestingdatagigs.substack.com", "location": "Lima", "favorite_candy": "oreo", "superpower": "connection builder"}' -H "Content-Type: application/json" -X POST https://contact.companyname.com/jobs

Why does this matter?

It’s very simple: Plaid is an API-first company. So, if you put the effort to use their own API to send the job application, this proves that you are serious about it.

2. Study the Data tech stack at Plaid

If you read the description of the role, you will find something like this:

Data Engineers heavily leverage SQL and Python to build data workflows that integrate with our Golang and Typescript applications. We use tools like DBT, Airflow, Redshift, ElasticSearch, Atlan, and Retool to orchestrate data pipelines and define workflows. We work with engineers, product managers, business intelligence, data analysts, and many other teams to build Plaid's data strategy and a data-first mindset.

They are describing here some of the tools they are currently using there.

What could you do about it?

First, do deeper research on how they are using these tools, and provide some ways to improve the way they are using them.

For example:

Another part of the job description says this:

Our engineering culture is IC-driven -- we favor bottom-up ideation and empowerment of our incredibly talented team. We are looking for engineers who are motivated by creating impact for our consumers and customers, growing together as a team, shipping the MVP, and leaving things better than we found them.

which is very interesting because this means that the company loves automation word.

So, think more deeply about this, specifically about ways how to automate more processes inside the Data platform.

3. Don’t forget to read Plaid’s blog, especially Engineering and People sections

I shared some links above from the Engineering blog at Plaid, but don’t stop there. Keep reading the posts dedicated to it, there are very interesting.

Another interesting part of Plaid’s blog is the section dedicated to talking about the culture of the company called Plaid People.

There are unique posts there, like this interview with Elena Branchini (Technical Recruiter at Plaid).

One of my favorite parts of the interview was this one:

What do you love most about working at Plaid?

My team. And my manager! Actually, a big reason I joined the Plaid team was because I was really excited about the opportunity to learn from my manager, Chris Ahsing. You spend such a significant amount of time with your manager and team, so it is very important that you feel supported.

Having a positive relationship with your team impacts how you feel about your work and how you show up each day. I feel really lucky to work alongside such incredible people. In recruiting it is often difficult to find a team environment where collaboration is a core component.

At Plaid, the recruiting team genuinely cares about one another and wants each other to be successful.

Or this post from Ripsy Bandourian (Head of Plaid Europe) when she joined the company to command the EU team and drive the growth there:

We have a massive opportunity to enable innovators to create products and services that better suit people’s needs–just as we have since Plaid’s early days. In the coming months, I will meet with many people across Europe’s digital financial ecosystem to understand their needs and how Plaid can help.

Our team in London and Amsterdam have laid an excellent foundation for our next phase of growth.

Since 2019 when Plaid first entered the UK, our team has launched a full-stack open banking solution to support data and payments, expanded services across continental Europe, launched a payments partner network, and grown into the premier transatlantic open banking platform. With one integration, companies can now access the best of open banking across Europe and North America. This is just the first step on our mission to unlock financial freedom across the world.

People like Elena and Ripsy are enjoying their roles inside Plaid.

For that reason, I say that this is the perfect time to be part of it.

4. Why not use AWS Graviton3 for ECS or Kubernetes and Cast.AI?

As always I do with companies using Amazon Web Services, Plaid should be testing the new AWS Graviton3-based instances, especially if they are using Kubernetes hosted there.

EKS is one of the services that fully support this kind of instance:

AWS Graviton2 processors power Arm-based EC2 instances, delivering a major leap in performance and capabilities as well as significant cost savings. Improving application cost efficiency is a primary goal of running containers.

Combine both, and you get great price performance. For example, workload testing shows instance types based on Graviton2 processors deliver up to 40% better price performance than their equivalent x86-based M5, C5, and R5 families. Amazon EKS on AWS Graviton2 is generally available where both services are available regionally.

For a deep dive into why AWS Graviton3 is so innovative, watch this interesting interview with Dave Brown, VP of Amazon EC2 at AWS:

And of course, if they are actively using Kubernetes for so many things inside the company, Plaid should take a look at the amazing team at Cast.AI.

This company’s motto is very simple but powerful:

Cut your bill in half with automated cloud cost optimization and monitoring

According to the company, their clients save an average of 63% on their cloud bills, which is huge; especially for large engineering teams like Plaid.

So, this could be a very interesting way to make the platform more efficient in costs and performance wise.

Enough of writing. Time to take action, my friend

Possible colleagues at Plaid

🚨 Join the Interesting Data Gigs Talent Network 🚨

It’s the perfect time to be part of The Interesting Data Gigs Talent Network, where you will find excellent Data Analytics jobs from companies like Netflix, Apple, Consensys, and many more.

Let’s change the game together: Instead of people applying to companies, companies will pitch to you, so don’t wait any other moment and join today.

Other featured jobs of the Talent Network

Why you need to follow the work of these Fintech luminaries: Lex Sokolin and Mary Ann Azevedo

In the case of Lex, he is the Managing Editor behind one of my favorite Fintech newsletters out there called Fintech Blueprint:

I strongly believe that if you are applying for a job in Fintech startups, you must subscribe to Lex’s newsletter.

He and his team are always sharing the last news about the industry, and a deep covering of a topic like this one about the $40 Billion collapse of Terra.

You can read an example here:

In the case of Mary, she is one of the amazing reporters covering everything related to Fintech at TechCrunch.

Now, she has a dedicated column to it called “The Interchange“ where she writes about fintech luminaries like Ramp (I encourage you to read this one, it’s an amazing piece of journalism), Petal, TomoCredit, and many more.

Mary has a deep experience covering financial technology stuff, so she is one of my favorite content prolific machines in this field.

She is very active on Twitter, so follow her there now.

Interesting resources of the week

Final words

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Thanks a lot for reading and I would love to hear your feedback about it. If you prefer faster comms, just send me a Tweet or a DM there → @marcosluis2186

Marcos out.

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