Senior Staff AI Engineer

SoFi; Frisco (TX); On-site; USD 200,000 - 260,000; Full time

Job summary

SoFi is seeking a Senior Staff AI Engineer to lead hands-on AI initiatives in our independent risk organization. You will define architecture, drive deployment of LLM-based solutions, and mentor engineers while aligning technical innovation with risk and compliance needs.

This senior role focuses on robust AI platforms, stateful reasoning, and scalable infra, with collaboration across risk analytics, engineering, and product teams to deliver impactful banking AI capabilities.

Qualifications

• 8+ years software development with 3+ years in production AI apps.
• Expert-level LangGraph modeling and orchestration.
• Proficient in building agentic solutions (planning, memory, control).
• Deep LLM architecture, prompt engineering, RAG.
• PEFT techniques like LoRA for task-specific tuning.
• Experience with cloud platforms (AWS/Azure/GCP) and Docker/Kubernetes.
• Strong communication and cross-functional collaboration.

Responsibilities

• Define long-term AI platform architecture and strategy.
• Architect graph-based LLM orchestration with LangGraph.
• Develop persistent agent memory for distributed workflows.
• Pioneer parameter-efficient fine-tuning and compression.
• Support model serving platform for diverse hardware.
• Define AI observability, tracing, testing standards.
• Mentor senior and junior AI Engineers.
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams for roadmaps.
• Stay updated on GenAI trends and banking AI applications.

Skills

LangGraph

Python

Kubernetes

Docker

LLM orchestration

React

Snowflake

DynamoDB

NLP

AI strategy

Education

Bachelor's or Master’s in CS/DS/AI

Tools

vLLM

NVIDIA Triton

TGI

Elasticsearch

Job description

Who we are:

Shape a brighter financial future with us.

Employee Applicant Privacy Notice

Who we are:

Shape a brighter financial future with us.

Together with our members, we’re changing the way people think about and interact with personal finance. We’re a next-generation financial services company and national bank using innovative, mobile-first technology to help our millions of members reach their goals. The industry is going through an unprecedented transformation, and we’re at the forefront. We’re proud to come to work every day knowing that what we do has a direct impact on people’s lives, with our core values guiding us every step of the way. Join us to invest in yourself, your career, and the financial world.

The role:

SoFi’s Senior Staff AI Engineer is a hands‑on AI engineering role in SoFi’s growing independent risk organization. This is a critical, senior role responsible for setting the technical direction, driving execution, and ensuring the successful delivery of our most complex, production‑level AI initiatives. This role will be instrumental in conceptualizing, prototyping and implementing best‑in‑class AI‑based solutions to meet risk management and compliance requirements.

This hands‑on role will work closely with the Director of Risk Analytics, and will leverage your deep expertise to solve our hardest problems, mentor the next generation of engineers, and directly connect technical innovation to major business success. This is a crucial role for the independent risk function as we execute our mission to help more members get their money right.

What you’ll do:

• Architecture and Strategy: Define the long-term technical architecture and strategy for our next-generation AI platform, particularly focusing on robust, scalable agentic frameworks and LLM deployment patterns.
• Advanced LLM Orchestration: Architect and standardize the use of graph‑based LLM orchestration, leveraging expert‑level mastery of LangGraph to solve highly complex, multi‑stage reasoning problems at scale.
• Distributed Agent Memory & State: Develop robust, persistent infrastructure for agentic state management, ensuring that long-running agent workflows maintain context and reliability across distributed nodes and regional failovers
• Deep Model Optimization: Pioneer and institutionalize advanced parameter‑efficient fine‑tuning (PEFT) and compression techniques to maximize model performance and minimize operational costs across the organization.
• Model Serving Infrastructure: Support the development of a unified model serving platform designed to host internally fine‑tuned and custom‑trained models to ensure high‑throughput, low‑latency inference across diverse hardware footprints.
• Operational Excellence: Define and enforce high standards for AI operationalization, requiring mastery in designing and deploying comprehensive AI observability solutions and advanced tracing/testing frameworks that guarantee production quality, compliance, and reliability.
• Mentorship: Mentor senior and junior AI Engineers, elevating the overall engineering quality
• Cross Functional Collaboration: Coordinate with cross‑functional teams to distill specific requirements, project roadmaps, and ensure accurate and on‑time project deliveries
• AI Innovation: Stay up-to-date with the latest trends and advancements in GenAI, LLMs, and NLP, evaluating and experimenting with new techniques and tools to push the boundaries of AI innovation in the banking sector.

What you’ll need:

• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Data Science, AI, Machine Learning, or a related field. PhD is a plus.
• 8+ years software development experience, with 3+ years of hands‑on experience in developing and successfully deploying production‑level AI applications that have been used by real customers or internal stakeholders.
• Expert‑level experience with LangGraph to model and orchestrate complex, stateful multi‑step reasoning and control flow in LLM applications.
• Expert‑level proficiency in developing sophisticated agentic solutions, with a portfolio demonstrating advanced use of planning, memory management, tool integration, and control flow.
• Deep understanding of Large Language Model (LLM) architectures, prompt engineering, retrieval‑augmented generation (RAG), and advanced text generation techniques.
• Proven experience implementing parameter‑efficient fine‑tuning (PEFT) techniques (e.g., LoRA) to customize and optimize pre‑trained models for specific tasks with minimal computational overhead.
• Deep expertise in building or extending inference engines (e.g., vLLM, NVIDIA Triton, or TGI) and managing the underlying Kubernetes/GPU orchestration for custom model deployments.
• Deep experience designing and institutionalizing AI observability solutions (e.g., LangSmith, Arize, Deepchecks) and advanced tracing and testing methodologies for LLM and agentic systems.
• Experience with cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, or GCP) and containerization technologies (Docker, Kubernetes).
• Expert level Python is required.
• React is strongly preferred.
• Experience with large‑scale data handling, including unstructured and structured data pipelines, with a strong preference for Snowflake and DynamoDB.
• Experience developing and integrating AI‑powered APIs and microservices architecture into banking applications.
• Experience with vector databases and retrieval‑augmented generation (RAG) techniques using systems like Elasticsearch, Pinecone, or FAISS for enhancing LLM performance.
• Exceptional ability to communicate complex technical concepts, drive consensus among senior technical leaders, and influence organizational AI strategy.
• Strong analytical and problem‑solving skills with attention to detail and an ability to work with complex, large‑scale systems.
• Strong collaboration skills, with experience working in agile, cross‑functional teams.

Nice to have:

• Familiarity with regulatory frameworks and ethical considerations in AI within the banking industry (e.g., GDPR, data privacy, model explainability).
• Experience in banking or financial services use cases such as conversational AI for customer service, intelligent document processing for loan applications, fraud detection, or risk analysis.

Compensation And Benefits

The base pay range for this role is listed below. Final base pay offer will be determined based on individual factors such as the candidate’s experience, skills, and location.

To view all of our comprehensive and competitive benefits, visit our Benefits at SoFi page!

SoFi provides equal employment opportunities (EEO) to all employees and applicants for employment without regard to race, color, religion (including religious dress and grooming practices), sex (including pregnancy, childbirth and related medical conditions, breastfeeding, and conditions related to breastfeeding), gender, gender identity, gender expression, national origin, ancestry, age (40 or over), physical or medical disability, medical condition, marital status, registered domestic partner status, sexual orientation, genetic information, military and/or veteran status, or any other basis prohibited by applicable state or federal law.

The Company hires the best qualified candidate for the job, without regard to protected characteristics.

Pursuant to the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, we will consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records.

New York applicants: Notice of Employee Rights

SoFi is committed to an inclusive culture. As part of this commitment, SoFi offers reasonable accommodations to candidates with physical or mental disabilities. If you need accommodations to participate in the job application or interview process, please let your recruiter know or email [e-mail].

We are unable to accommodate remote work from Hawaii, Alaska or Puerto Rico at this time.