Plaid is planting a physical flag in Seattle. The San Francisco-based financial technology company plans to open an office hub in the Westlake neighborhood and aims to grow its local workforce to around 80 employees next year.
Plaid plans to expand in the Seattle market next year, according to The Seattle Times.
Hiring Push Spans Engineering and AI Roles
Plaid has a Seattle opening for a staff machine learning engineer, according to its job listings. Job listings posted on the company's own site offer a glimpse of what some of that work looks like. A listing for a staff machine learning engineer role in the Seattle office describes leading the technical strategy and development of Plaid's foundation models, driving key decisions across pretraining objectives, model architecture, and fine-tuning approaches, according to a Plaid job posting.
A separate backend software engineer listing describes joining Plaid's Engineering team to build what the posting calls simple yet innovative consumer products and developer APIs that shape how people interact with money and the financial system.
A Talent-Rich but Jittery Office Market
Plaid's bet on Seattle talent lines up with recent rankings. The city placed second among 50 North American markets in CBRE's 2026 Tech Talent Scorecard, trailing only the Bay Area, according to GeekWire. The outlet also reported that Seattle added 24,590 tech jobs between 2022 and 2025, a 13.1% increase, and that the region is home to 41,591 workers with AI skills, the third-highest total in North America.
Not every signal is rosy, though. GeekWire's report also noted that Seattle's population of people in their 20s fell between 2019 and 2024, even as its share of people in their 30s grew to the highest of any market tracked. And Axios has documented at least 20 publicly announced rounds of layoffs affecting Seattle-area workers this year, with layoff notices in King and other counties touching 9,027 workers through Aug. 18 — about three-quarters of them in the information sector, per Axios, which cautioned that such notices reflect planned layoffs rather than jobs necessarily lost. The outlet also reported that King County had 800 fewer information jobs in July than a year earlier, even as overall county employment grew by 6,700 jobs.
Office Vacancies Remain a Wild Card
Plaid's move into Westlake comes as the city's office market remains unsettled, with vacancy estimates varying by source. GeekWire reported the Seattle metro area's office vacancy rate hit 28.6% in the fourth quarter of 2025, the highest of the 50 markets in its report, while MyNorthwest, citing a CommercialCafe report, put the figure at 26.6%. MyNorthwest also described some submarkets as far worse off, with Pioneer Square topping 50% vacancy, and said landlords across the city are offering aggressive concessions to attract tenants.
That tenant-friendly climate hasn't stopped some companies from committing to Seattle office space. Slalom extended its 76,000-square-foot lease in Pioneer Square through 2034, according to MyNorthwest.
