cover_letter / art_KuWR7F-UMqY

Dear Plaid Hiring Team, Plaid sits at the intersection of financial infrastructure and consumer empowerment — connecting 12,000 financial institutions to the apps people use to manage their money. That mission resonates directly with work I've done: I built Fintellect AI from scratch to democratize financial literacy and investing for everyday people, and I've spent the last several years building AI-native products that make complex systems accessible. The opportunity to bring that same orientation inside Plaid — identifying where AI can meaningfully accelerate your go-to-market, operations, and finance teams — is exactly the kind of high-leverage, mission-aligned work I want to do next. **Technical and AI Foundation** My AI work spans both research depth and production breadth. At the research end, I published at NeurIPS 2014 on neural networks for protein structure prediction and recently rebuilt that system in PyTorch (413 parameters to 8B — a 19-million-fold scale increase), with MLflow experiment tracking, Optuna hyperparameter optimization, and FastAPI serving. I built a full RL post-training workbench covering 12 algorithms (PPO, GRPO, DPO, DAPO, and more) with live SSE metric streaming and head-to-head framework benchmarking across TRL, VeRL, OpenRLHF, and NeMo RL. I also built aeval, a local-first model evaluation platform with bootstrap confidence intervals, Welch's t-test, Cohen's d effect sizing, and automated safety gates — the kind of statistical rigor that separates production AI from demos. On the applied side, I architected OpenClaw, a multi-agent orchestration framework with a gateway protocol, subagent delegation, and profile management — coordinating AI workflows across real estate, insurance, health, and financial-markets use cases. I built a RAG retrieval pipeline with ChromaDB, multi-provider LLM orchestration (Claude, GPT-4, Gemini), fallback routing, and token-budget optimization. These aren't proof-of-concept projects — they're shipped products with real users, App Store approvals, and monetization. **Why This Role** My career has moved between building developer platforms at scale (Intuit, Splunk) and founding AI-native companies (Streamio AI, Fintellect AI). The Plaid Staff PM — Internal AI role sits precisely at that intersection: it requires the platform-thinking and stakeholder alignment of an enterprise PM, the hands-on AI fluency of a builder, and the go-to-market instincts of a founder. I've done all three, and I'm drawn to the challenge of doing them together inside a company whose infrastructure already touches millions of financial lives. **What Excites Me About This Specific Role** The scope — Sales, GTM, Finance, HR — is exactly where AI interventions compound. At Intuit, I worked closely with telemetry and usage data across ~20 mobile apps and 30+ product SKUs to prioritize developer pain points, and I understand how to translate ambiguous organizational needs into concrete, measurable tooling. The fact that this role works closely with the CEO signals that Plaid is treating internal AI as a strategic priority, not a side project — that's the kind of mandate where I do my best work. I'm also drawn to the training and adoption dimension: shipping a tool is the beginning, not the end, and I've built the feedback loops (usage monitoring, iterative refinement, customer discovery) to make adoption stick. **Selected Relevant Experience** - **Intuit — ICE Self-Service Platform:** Delivered DevPortal, GitOps config, and ICE Playground, reducing developer onboarding from 2–3 weeks to minutes in pre-prod and under 24 hours for production; mitigated $1M+ in projected opex growth. Scaled ICE engagements 275% YoY to 675M+ in FY23 across QuickBooks, TurboTax, Mint, Mailchimp, and Credit Karma. - **Intuit — Cross-Functional Platform Leadership:** Conducted enterprise-wide Service Language Assessment across 9 languages, analyzing usage data and developer feedback to inform strategic investment decisions presented to the CTO; worked with SQL and BigQuery to prioritize pain points across ~20 mobile apps and 30+ SKUs. - **Streamio AI / OpenClaw:** Built and shipped a multi-agent orchestration framework coordinating AI workflows across real estate, insurance, health/dental, and financial-markets industries — including contextual AI analysis, Pine Script generation for trading, and automated CMA reports via Redfin/Zillow APIs. - **Fintellect AI — GTM Execution:** Led customer discovery on trader feedback, established influencer partnerships, and executed go-to-market through App Store launch; built 13 specialized AI advisors delivering guided, context-aware financial advisory on live Alpaca market data. - **Vantage (Streamio AI) — AI Tooling for Non-Technical Users:** Shipped an AI job search and interview prep platform with STAR behavioral rehearsal, an automated AI judge, LeetCode-catalog coding drills, and live 1:1 coaching — designing AI-powered workflows for users who are not engineers. - **Splunk — Search Orchestration PM:** Owned Search Service (Go microservices), Search Catalog, and SPL/SPL2; delivered Scheduler Service end-to-end in ~4 months; led query performance optimization achieving up to 10x improvements for a Fortune 500 beta customer. - **De Anza College — Adjunct Faculty:** Teaching data analytics, cloud computing, and Java programming since 2018 — a consistent practice of translating technical concepts for non-technical audiences and building durable learning frameworks. **Closing** Plaid's mission — unlocking financial freedom for everyone — is one I've been working toward from a different angle for the past several years. Bringing AI inside Plaid to make your own teams faster, smarter, and more effective is a direct multiplier on that mission. I'd welcome the conversation about how my background maps to what you're building. Respectfully, **O. Felix Amoruwa** famoruwa@berkeley.edu · 909-731-9011 · felixamoruwa.info