Senior Staff AI Platform Engineer, Developer Experience

SoFi; San Francisco, Seattle (CA, WA); On-site; USD 220,000 - 320,000; Full time

Job summary

SoFi is seeking a founding Senior Staff Software Engineer for the AI Platform to set architecture and drive the interactive coding strategy across autonomous coding, CI/CD, and Code Factory. You’ll lead high-impact initiatives across multiple engineering squads and craft scalable solutions, balancing cost, latency, and reliability.

You will mentor engineers, shape roadmaps, and raise standards for resilience and security while collaborating with product areas to deliver robust, enterprise-grade

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s Degree + 4+ Years of Experience OR Master’s Degree + 3+ Years of Experience in software engineering, CS, or related field.
• Proven track record of technical leadership across multiple teams and distributed architectures.
• Adept system design for large-scale, high-availability distributed systems and APIs.
• Hands-on experience with LLM-based architectures, model APIs, and AI-assisted development tools.
• Experience designing or operating model evaluation pipelines, AI gateways, or dynamic routing systems.
• Ability to analyze infrastructure economics, capacity trade-offs, and telemetry.
• Excellent communication and cross-functional leadership skills.
• Commitment to engineering best practices, security guardrails, data privacy, and maintainable design.

Responsibilities

• Set Technical Direction for enterprise AI Gateway, model routing, evaluation platform, and harness vending across business units.
• Shape Strategy Roadmaps by identifying bottlenecks and translating into 12–24 month technical plans.
• Lead AI Economics Engineering (cost models, metering, telemetry, routing policies).
• Drive Cross-Group Initiatives spanning multiple teams with shared interfaces and contracts.
• Resolve Architectural Deficiencies in latency, throughput, and state across distributed systems.
• Evaluate Build-vs-Buy choices for AI tooling and integration patterns.
• Represent Group Architecture in planning and RFCs and drive design reviews.
• Raise Operational Excellence with production standards, incident response, post- incident reviews.
• Mentor Senior (IC3) and Staff (IC4) engineers to foster craft, ownership, and safety.

Skills

Technical leadership

System design

Distributed systems

LLM-based architectures

Model APIs

AI development tooling

Security guardrails

Data privacy

Cross-functional leadership

Communication

Education

Bachelor’s Degree + 4+ Years

Master’s Degree + 3+ Years

Tools

None specified

Job description

SoFi is seeking a founding Senior Staff Software Engineer for the AI Platform to set architecture and drive the interactive coding strategy across autonomous coding, CI/CD, and Code Factory. You’ll lead high-impact initiatives across multiple engineering squads and craft scalable solutions, balancing cost, latency, and reliability.

You will mentor engineers, shape roadmaps, and raise standards for resilience and security while collaborating with product areas to deliver robust, enterprise-grade